Own the rights?
35 out of 57 people found the following review useful: watch 'Jim', 8 October 2001 Author: jellyneckr
ACCORDING TO JIM is a show that will appeal to some and not appeal to others. Fans of Jim Belushi will be glad to see he finally has his own sitcom and people who don't like Jim Belushi will find this show unwatchable. I've been a Jim Belushi fan for a long time so for me, this show is a real treat. This is an absolutely hilarious show for all ages.
17 out of 24 people found the following review useful: Another mediocre sitcom with an actor who used to be pretty great, 13 September 2005 Author: policy134 from Denmark
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Jim Belushi or is it James may not have been as big a star as his late brother, John but in many ways he was a better actor than him. Although he wasted his talents all through the 90's, he made the rather good K-9 and the more serious but still funny The Principal.Here he simply mugs his way through an almost buried genre, the sitcom and a family sitcom to boot. Wasn't there any way that this could have been more than just a mildly amusing series of Belushi wisecracks sprinkled with a little lesson of the day. Apparently not, so what we have is the big slob who has been somewhat domesticated plus the nagging but understanding wife. We also get the wussy brother-in-law plus the sister-in-law who acts like she was the female Jim incarnate.Although I don't really think that any of the actors are that funny, I must say that there are some scattered laughs, especially when Belushi end up having to explain himself to his wife which happens quite a few times. The way he comes up with excuses and still makes you think that he can get away with it is hard to make believable but that he does.There was a of course a guest appearance by family friend Dan Aykroyd but it wasn't particularly funny and the recurring characters of Jim's blues buddies are mostly below par.Here's to hoping that sitcoms will some day still have the same edge as when Married with Children was on the air because it is certainly a milquetoast watching experience today.
31 out of 53 people found the following review useful: Love the show, 16 May 2007 Author: (lynn@bobsredmill.com) from United States
Please do not take this show off the air...my family loves it, and there is 7 that watch it....Jim is so funny and so is Andy....Please we need more comedies, less realities and especially less hospital shows, now another one is coming on. Real life can be so upsetting with the war, the killings, the rapes; that a half hour of laughter just brightens up everyones day. According to Jim is a real down to earth show, with different things our family can relate to. There are several people at work that watch to show and we discuss on our break. The kids add to the show also. Please for the sake of all the wrongs in the world, lets keep some laughter on television.
28 out of 49 people found the following review useful: Get your weekly "Cozy" right here, folks, 1 April 2003 Author: Amy from Texas
I have watched this from its beginning and I find myself always wanting to watch when it's on. For me, it has a lot to do with the actors on it. I'm so glad Courtney Thorn Smith decided to do ATJ, because it shows a snugly, sweet, Earth Mother side of her that's really appealing. Kimberly Williams is very believable and refreshing as her Single Career Woman With Angst sister. Larry Joe (forgot his last name) is funny and sympathetic and happily helpless as her brother. Lastly I mention Jim Belushi. He is just fab in his part as Courtney's hubby. It's both scary and exhilerating to watch him. It's like seeing John Belushi but all grown up and, well, normal (mentally). For years now, I've watched Jim and seen only John. Now, thanks to this show, I am finally seeing Jim for Jim. He is pure funny, great timing, great sincerity, and he knows how to be serious when it calls for it. Great dimension for a character who started out as little more than just a caricature. I've been delightfully amazed. He's quite good in this particular role (you know, like Ackroyd is just excellent as the balding Southern good ole boy of both Driving Miss Daisy and My Girl), and I hope this sitcom makes it for a few years so I can keep on enjoying it.Courtney knows how to hold her own and then some against Jim. They walk the thin line between being the Bundies and the Bunkers and the Buchmans. Their chemistry is very on-target. Everyone's is, actually.The arguments are quite believable. Good writing. I like the running joke about expanding vocabulary. This show isn't Seinfeld or Cheers, but it is a solidly written comical commentary on married family life. Couples can watch together and both enjoy it, neither gender is spared, both are poked fun at and both are strongly represented. I agree with the previous post that if you dislike Belushi, you probably won't like it. Ditto for C.T.-S., although she might surprise you.If you do decide to check it out, give it 3 chances. I didn't warm up to it til after that many episodes, and now I'm glad I gave it a chance. It's a nice change from Reality Everything.
42 out of 80 people found the following review useful: Funny Funny Funny, And Oh Yeah, FUNNY!!!, 6 July 2003 Author: emilyisasweetie from usa
Okay I'll admit it, the first time I saw the commercial for this show I didn't think it looked all that great, but I decided I'd watch it anyway, and I'm glad I did. Courtney Thorne- Smith plays Jim's wife, shes kinda annoying but she also makes the show really worth watching. Larry Joe Campbell who plays Andy is absolutely hilarious and him and Jim make a great comdedic team. This is the only tv show that I have actually fell off the couch laughing to. I give this show 11 out of 10 stars. This show is staying put and not goin anywhere!!!
25 out of 49 people found the following review useful: a regular guy just like us, 24 July 2007 Author: magicmmirror from United States
I wish I could say that this show was unusual in it's banality,but it is usual in every way.It has the dumb husband,his smarter but boring and conventional wife, along with the idiotic sidekick for "comic" relief-it sorely needs it.Stale predictable jokes, with even more predictable reactions from the laughtrack, punctuate this noxious mental narcotic's nauseatingly unimaginative plot lines to leave me either physically ill, or in a deep sleep more resembling that of an induced coma. But it might be on for a while yet because it gives the average American a personage to which they can truly identify.A "regular" guy just like you and me.I live in the southern U.S, so to me this show is just the opposite of escapism.Down here, that obnoxious character is everywhere, in some form or another.Seeing him on television is brutal overkill.
17 out of 35 people found the following review useful: Just another obnoxious slob comedy, 2 June 2004 Author: howTVshouldbe from star range: 1 - 4, expanded to 5 for classics
Network: ABC; Genre: Sitcom; Content Rating: TV-G; Classification: Contemporary (star range: 1 - 4)Season Reviewed: Series (3+ season)The only reason According to Jim' is even still on the air, as of this writing, is because it isn't a reality show. Launched by ABC in the fall of 2002 with '8 Simple Rules', 'Life with Bonnie' and 'Less than Perfect', it was part of the network's pendulum swing away from the reality genera and back toward more audience-pleasing scripted family comedies. It's much better than a reality show, but a hard punch in the back of the head would be too. So, now we're stuck with this monster. In that reality rebellion I'm afraid the audience may have given Jim Belushi, the cast and his writers the impression that they were actually funny. They aren't and as a sitcom the show is a waste of time and space on every level. How many ways can you say that something is bad? 'Jim' is nothing, like a spec of dust in the air. It has no distinct characters or comic talents. It has no vision or voice. It has no chemistry. It has no desire to do anything creative or original. It doesn't want to tell a story or even strain to hard to tell a joke. It wants to be escapism and get a laugh every now and then and it can't even do that. At the same time it isn't even bad up on an insulting level that I can get worked up and challenge it. The show is headlined with another classic improbable sitcom odd-couple marriage in Belushi and Courtney Thorne-Smith ('Melrose Place', if that doesn't say it all). The husband/father is, typically, a tubby sports and sex-obsessed idiot always needing to be wrangled in by his more sensible, down to earth, and never wrong wife. As much as this TV husband lives in constant fear of not having sex, he is also so self absorbed that he will forgo opportunities for said sex so he can attend a football game, watch a football game or some other act of self indulgence. They make up cute at the end of each episode so they could go through the same thing again. None of these shows have the guts to end with their wives finally filing for divorce. For those that haven't heard this a thousand times before: these kind of escapist sitcoms are designed to pander to the married/relationship set - for the husbands to fantasize that they can be as much a pig as they want and still get Courtney Thorne-Smith. Wives are to feel like they are doing an act of charity raising both their kids and childish husbands who are constantly screwing up and getting them into predicaments. We're all supposed to hold hands at the end, look into each others eyes and say "that's just like us" or "it's so realistic". That illusion of familiarity is the only thing that keeps these shows running. Belushi, swallowing the slob sitcom clichés whole-heartedly, is flat-out obnoxious. Everyone else, including Thorne-Smith, cute Kimberly Williams and Larry Joe Campbell (as Belushi's fat slob sidekick) run around and fall all over the place trying their paltry best to give this any signs of life. It is embarrassing to watch. Next time I come across another one of these cookie-cutter sitcoms, I'm going to make it easy on myself and just cut and paste this review and change the names. See if anyone notices. Hey, you get out what you put in.*
3 out of 8 people found the following review useful: Selfish deadbeats aren't funny, 28 September 2009 Author: hejsamester from Denmark
All the funny things happening in this sitcom is based on the main character Jim being either a bad father, a bad husband or generally just enormously selfish. How can that be funny? Of course a character in a sitcom has to be flawed, but Jim's character is flawed in an extremely unsympathetic manner.And why it that? My guess is that it's because "he should now better". Jim's not a stupid guy, he can take care of things and he's got the opportunities to do so. But he chooses not to. It's a conscious choice he makes, when he chooses to not play with his kids, not go shopping because he doesn't want to buy "lady products" and it's a choice he makes, when he puts down his relatives.The other characters seems to only be in the series so Jim can have someone to be a jerk to. If the Cheryl character was a real person, she would have left him years ago, and not stay with the deadbeat for 8 years. But alas, she's just a catalyst for Jim's quirky middle-class extreme selfishness.
5 out of 12 people found the following review useful: Poorly TV-show!, 17 June 2008 Author: danny-418 from Iceland
I always wrote this series off as being a complete stink-fest because Jim Belushi was involved in it, and heavily. But then one day a tragic happenstance occurred. After a White Sox game ended I realized that the remote was all the way on the other side of the room somehow. Now I could have just gotten up and walked across the room to get the remote, or even to the TV to turn the channel. But then why not just get up and walk across the country to watch TV in another state? "Nuts to that", I said. So I decided to just hang tight on the couch and take whatever Fate had in store for me. What Fate had in store was an episode of this show, an episode about which I remember very little except that I had once again made a very broad, general sweeping blanket judgment based on zero objective or experiential evidence with nothing whatsoever to back my opinions up with, and once again I was completely right! This show is a total crud-pie! Belushi has all the comedic delivery of a hairy lighthouse foghorn. The women are physically attractive but too Stepford-is to elicit any real feeling from the viewer. There is absolutely no reason to stop yourself from running down to the local TV station with a can of gasoline and a flamethrower and sending every copy of this mutt howling back to hell. Except.. Except for the wonderful comic sty lings of Larry Joe Campbell, America's Greatest Comic Character Actor. This guy plays Belushi's brother-in-law, Andy, and he is gold. How good is he really? Well, aside from being funny, his job is to make Belushi look good. That's like trying to make butt warts look good. But Campbell pulls it off with style. Someone should invent a Nobel Prize in Comic Buffoonery so he can win it every year. Without Larry Joe this show would consist of a slightly vacant looking Courtney Thorne-Smith smacking Belushi over the head with a frying pan while he alternately beats his chest and plays with the straw on the floor of his cage. 5 stars for Larry Joe Campbell designated Comedic Bacon because he improves the flavor of everything he's in!
12 out of 26 people found the following review useful: Courtney (Sheryl) is not funny., 10 November 2006 Author: max7561 from New York City, United States
The show is average. It doesn't make me laugh particularly. However, I think Courtney really brings it down. She doesn't look natural. She has these three ways to talk, all robotic. She talks quietly (with no intonation), she talks normally (with no intonation), or she does that thing where she starts talking normally, and starts yelling gradually. However, her yelling is like "let's pretend I'm yelling because I shouldn't be too loud on the set". She is constantly aware of herself being this cute actress doing this funny thing. It's annoying. You can't really get her personality, because she doesn't really produce emotion, and doesn't get upset. She has this husband, who's doing all these stupid things, and there is no reaction from her. Very dry and plain acting.
Add another review
