To me, this movie is perfection.

The Age of Commercialism

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Kate Fox (Dakota Johnson) is a high-strung single mom caring for her daughter Maddie and her fun-loving loser older brother Ben (Nat Faxon). BJ (Lucy Punch) is her best friend and Tommy (Echo Kellum) is his best friend.Dakota is great at playing the standard cute awkward girl. I love Lucy Punch and she's playing a character named BJ. Nat Faxon is almost always loads of fun. Even Echo and the little girl are cute. Everyone is cute, loving, and seems like a one happy family. I love everybody in this show although the setup is very standard. They seem to enjoy each other and have good chemistry. It lasted 1 season with 16 episodes. I do wish they could have continued. The traditional setup functioned well.

Ben and Kate is a fantastic and deeply underrated show. Upbeat and inventive, it features one of the best ensemble casts on broadcast TV. In particular, Nat Faxon and Lucy Punch demonstrate incredible comedic timing and help elevate the show above what could have been an ordinary half hour of television. Additionally, the show's writing distinguishes itself from other sitcoms, since it is genuinely funny, yet also consistently positive and earnest. I would highly recommend this show to fans of Community, 30 Rock, New Girl, or any other similar feel-good, yet original show on television. As of the writing of this review, 13 episodes have been aired and the remaining 6 are in limbo. Nevertheless, I would highly recommend that anyone seek out the episodes already available, since they stand on their own like other comedy show that were cancelled too soon in their time like Undeclared and Freaks and Geeks. You will be genuinely happy that you did so and, hopefully, someday in the near future, we will see the remaining episodes and some closure to this gem of a sitcom.

Horrible...have tried 2 episodes and won't bother again. It's simply not a premise that works. These people do not act like brother and sister (if you didn't know that's what they were supposed to be you'd be baffled -- as we were the first episode and DIDN'T know the plot). Everything is overly-contrived and um, isn't this supposed to be a comedy...where are the laughs?. Dakota Johnson looks like she's in pain all the time (probably from having to recite the boring lines in the pointless scripts). Nat Faxon acts like a clueless teenager, but he's obviously not, so this is a hard act to buy. And I'm sorry, it may seem trivial, but his snaggleteeth are beyond distracting. A smile doesn't have to be perfect, but c'mon.

So what they did here is basically find a way to clone New Girl by replacing Zooey Deschanel with a guy. I'm tired of these shows where the characters are so odd that they become essentially unrealistic, yet somehow we're supposed to love them for their oddness. On New Girl, Jess is written to be so socially awkward that it goes way too over the top. I mean, she started tap dancing in a 5-star restaurant because something upset her. In the real world that would get you institutionalized or medicated at the least. Enter Ben, who is well into his 30's and likes to walk around wearing hockey and wrestling masks. When he realizes that his ex-girlfriend (who dumped him TWO YEARS AGO)is getting married, he can't stop himself from shouting even though his niece is in the car, so he just starts shouting gibberish words. When he plans to crash the wedding, no one talks him out of it and tells him to get a life and move on already. In real life, this guy's friends would demand he get therapy. Instead, his friends band together and help him. And even then, he's so out of touch with reality that he can't even rehearse his speech without screwing it up. I realize that TV would not be interesting if it was completely realistic all the time, but shows like New Girl and Ben and Kate go way too far in trying to make these characters into screw ups (Ben can't even back up and turn his car around for crying out loud!).