Byron Lafayette
In an era obsessed with prestige television, antiheroes, fractured timelines, and moral ambiguity draped in cinematic lighting, it can be easy to dismiss a show like Mike & Molly as something lesser. It ran on CBS, it had a laugh track, and it featured two people who fell in love at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. I can’t tell you how many people roll their eyes when I recommend it and then say, “It’s a sitcom.” Maybe I can change your mind?
Mike & Molly ran for six seasons from 2010 to 2016, created by Mark Roberts and produced by Chuck Lorre, the man behind Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. It stars Billy Gardell as Mike Biggs, a Chicago police officer, and Melissa McCarthy as Molly Flynn, a fourth-grade schoolteacher. They meet, they fall in love, they get married, they build a life. It sounds simple because it is. That is not a flaw; this is a show about life.
What makes Mike & Molly worth your time, really worth it, is not the premise. It is the people, Gardell and McCarthy have a chemistry that is genuinely rare on television. Their relationship never feels performed or manufactured for the sake of a punchline. When Mike is nervous and earnest and completely in over his head, you believe him. When Molly is sharp and funny and just a little exasperated by the world around her, you feel it in her. These are real people doing real things, and the show trusts that to be enough.
And then there is the cast.
Melissa McCarthy is one of the funniest people to ever appear on American screens, and Mike & Molly is where that became impossible to ignore. Her character Molly is warm and cutting and full of an energy that the show was smart enough to never contain. Billy Gardell brings a big-hearted performance as Mike Biggs (Two Gs), he wears his heart on his sleeve and manages to be a fully fleshed out character, not just Molly’s beau. The supporting cast—Swoosie Kurtz as Molly’s deeply unfiltered mother, Katy Mixon as her sister Victoria, AND Reno Wilson as Mike’s partner Carl—are all operating at the same level of committed, lived-in but slightly unhinged comic performance.
Many assume that a Chuck Lorre multi-camera sitcom is going to be nothing but setup-punchline-laugh track on a repeating loop, and to be fair, that concern is not entirely unfounded elsewhere in his catalog. But Mike and Molly carry something a little different in their bones. The show is funny, yes, laugh-out-loud funny, with it barely letting you recover from the last laugh before delivering another, but underneath the jokes is a show that takes its characters seriously. Mike and Molly’s relationship is treated with genuine respect. Their struggles with weight, with self-image, with the ordinary chaos of building a life together are not played for cruelty. The show is laughing with them, always, never at them.
That distinction matters more than it might seem.
There is also something quietly significant about a major network show centered on two leads who look like actual human beings rather than Hollywood approximations of them, who are allowed to be romantic and funny and fully realized without the show making their bodies the joke. As I said, we laugh with them, never at them. For six seasons, Mike and Molly got to simply exist, fall in love, and be people. That was rarer in 2010 than it should have been, and the show deserves credit for it.
Mike & Molly is not trying to be high drama. It is not interested in breaking you open with tragedy or dazzling you with structural innovation. What it wants, and what it succeeds at, is making you feel good. Not in a hollow, empty-calorie way, but in the way a really good meal with people you love does—warm, satisfying, and over too soon.
So pull up a chair across from Mike and Molly at Abe’s Hot Beef, order something you’ll enjoy, and let yourself laugh.
Mike & Molly is currently streaming on Netflix
