Prime-Time Therapy

By James Poniewozik

Each Wednesday at 8:30 P.M. E.T. on ABC, a character named George Lopez learns a little about himself--that his long-lost father is alive, though his mother claimed he died after walking out on the family, that he has a half brother he's never known about.

Each Monday night, in a therapist's office somewhere in Los Angeles, a different George Lopez story unfolds. There, the real-life comedian who plays his eponymous alter ego also learns about himself a little at a time. He learns how to be part of a family--his idea of bonding with his 6-year-old daughter used to be to turn on the tube and sit in silence. He learns to forgive his grandmother, who raised him after his mother abandoned him but didn't show him affection or even celebrate his birthday. Lopez, 41, still tears up when he remembers waiting at home alone when she would work into the night without bothering to call. "I have come to understand that I cannot expect someone who doesn't feel to feel," he says. "She never knew joy or how to express it."

Besides, he owes her his career. On George Lopez, he plays a could-have-been version of himself, a manager at an airplane-parts factory trying to work out his relationship with a cold, critical mother figure. In a sense, Lopez began creating the show when he was a boy, escaping into the comforting alternative universe of sitcoms like Julia, with Diahann Carroll as a loving single mom, and Chico and the Man, with Latino comic Freddie Prinze. "It was the first time I ever saw anybody on TV who looked like me," Lopez says. Inspired by Prinze, Lopez became a stand-up comedian, but his career floundered until Chris Rock's manager, Dave Becky, told Lopez he needed to put his story into his act. "He said, 'With you, people laugh, but there is nothing to attach to,'" Lopez says.

Still, it was more than a decade before he got a call from a producer--Jonathon Komack Martin, the son of Chico's creator. Komack Martin and his partner, actress Sandra Bullock, wanted to do a Latino Beverly Hillbillies, an idea they mercifully dropped after seeing Lopez's act. "You can see he fought to get where he is, yet he is hilarious," says Bullock. "He has a way of hiding his pain, but you can also see it."

Lopez is the first major-network sitcom in years to feature a Latino family, even as Hispanics have grown to about an eighth of the U.S. population. The show subtly represents the variety of Latin culture--for instance, George is Mexican and his wife Angie (Constance Marie) is Cuban. But it also brings a different kind of diversity to TV. Few sitcoms since Roseanne have taken a raw, personal look at a working-class family and its psychological baggage. Most family comedies today avoid dark themes or sublimate them, as in Everybody Loves Raymond's passive-aggressive squabbles. Lopez is willing to get ugly, albeit with a grin. After a fight between George and his mom (Belita Moreno), Angie asks, "Are you never going to talk to her again?" "No," he deadpans. "Eventually I'm going to have to say, 'It's O.K., Mom, let go. Head for the light.'" Like most stand-ups, Lopez as an actor is no Daniel Day-Lewis; he's not even Daniel Stern. Yet he makes his beleaguered Everyman--stooped and half-grimacing, as though he eternally expects an anvil to fall on him--funny but affecting.

George Lopez is not as good as Roseanne--the characters usually reach too neat little epiphanies as each episode ends--but is far better than when it started last spring as a bland family comedy with a dash of salsa. As the show explored George's learning about his father and dealing with the emotions that discovery dredged up, it came alive. It has held its own against reality juggernaut American Idol and got an early go-ahead for a third season.

But for all Lopez's success in the ratings and in therapy, memories of his youth are never far away. "I think of that little boy now," he says, "and I pretend he is with me when things are good and show him things are going to be all right." If that boy can keep reminding the man of when things weren't all right, George Lopez has a bright dark future. --Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles