Schooled is one of those shows that was really really good, but ended too soon. It's one of my favourite shows and, like The Goldbergs, has an amazing cast of characters. When the show was announced as a backdoor pilot during the fifth season of The Goldbergs and would focus on John Glascott, the guidance counselor played by Tim Meadows, I wasn't sure about it. Spin-offs rarely work, particularly with comedies, and as we saw with the Friends spin-off Joey, having a show about the one note comedy character doesn't work that well. However, the trio of Lainey, Glascott, and Mellor worked wonderfully on the show.
One of the things that I liked about Schooled is that not only did it focus on the teachers at the school, but it also focused on the kids in almost every episode. So while C.B. might have a subplot in an episode, Tom Scott, one of the kids that C.B. teaches, might have another subplot, and the two would converge, with the characters helping each other to realize something about whatever problem they're facing. Or one of the girls would have an issue and Lainey, or Lainey and Wilma in season 2, would step in to help them.
Something else I liked about the show is the '90s references, since the series is set in 1990-something. While I appreciate the '80s references on The Goldbergs, there are a lot of them that I just don't really understand because I wasn't born until the end of 1986 and while I do know some '80s things, there's a lot more that I just wasn't around for. I grew up in the '90s though, so I was there for the big popular Pop bands like the Spice Girls, the Backstreet Boys, and N'SYNC. I was there for movies like The Lion King, Titanic, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, and She's All That. I was also there for things like Friends, Pokemon, Beanie Babies, and Tamagotchi. Even the songs they play in the episodes are mostly songs that I'm familiar with because I heard them on the radio when I was a kid in the '90s. In fact more often than not I found myself singing along to those songs simply because I knew them. I'm just glad they never did an episode about Furbies.
The character dynamics are slightly on Schooled than they are on The Goldbergs. While Adam, Barry and Erica had their friends and romantic relationships the show focuses on the family as a whole so we don't really see Adam with Dave Kim and Emmy very often, especially in the earlier seasons of the series. But on Schooled the show focused on the school, so we saw Lainey, C.B. and Wilma together a lot same with Glascott and Mellor, or Mellor and his girlfriend Julie. Because of this, and because of the fact that friendships formed after high school tend to happen in the workplace, I felt that the relationships on Schooled were a lot more believable than they are on The Goldbergs. Not that the ones on The Goldbergs weren't believable, but I guess I related to them more on Schooled being that I've been out of high school for fourteen years now and my friendships are more like the ones on Schooled.
I actually felt that season 2 did a better job on dialing back on the '90s references. There were still a lot of them over the course of the season, but they tended to take more of a backseat to the characters and stories than they did in season 1. The Goldbergs actually had that same problem in it's first season, where the references were sometimes overshadow the story and characters, but it also got better as the show went into multiple seasons. Being that Schooled is only a two season series it didn't really get to stretch itself in that way.
One thing that I'm actually disappointed about is that Glascott's niece, Felicia, played by Rachel Crow, only ended up in seven episodes of the entire 34 episode run. Eight episodes if you count the backdoor pilot on The Goldbergs. Being that she was prominent in both the backdoor pilot and in the first episode of the series, I figured she'd be a more prominent character on the show. She wasn't though which might come from the fact that the show switched it's focus from Glascott to Lainey between the backdoor pilot and the first episode of the series. The character was cool though and I think it added an extra layer to Glascott as a character. Still though in the seven episodes she appeared in on the show proper, she was featured prominently since she was connected to Glascott.
Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall I thought Schooled was an awesome show. It was funny, smart, it had heart, and it had a great cast of characters that I enjoyed seeing every week as much as I enjoy seeing the characters on The Goldbergs every week. I do feel that ABC was wrong to cancel the series though. Especially since it's ratings in season 2 were on par with the ratings that The Goldbergs was getting in it's seventh season, which ran concurrently with season 2 of Schooled. Hopefully they'll bring it back at some point, maybe on a streaming platform. Either way, I'm going to miss the show and miss my Wednesday night hour of Goldberg created shows. While I don't like Schooled more than I like The Goldbergs, as they are two very different shows, I do think that Schooled was a slightly better written show simply because they didn't have to rely solely on stories from Adam's childhood as the framework for an episode and they could focus more on the characters. I'm giving Schooled 10/10 stars.
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