Kenan Thompson has a new NBC sitcom — finally — and while it’s long overdue, his wife had some thoughts about it.
via People:
During an appearance on Saturday night’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the 42-year-old comedian chatted about his upcoming sitcom, Kenan, and detailed what his wife’s initial thoughts were about the show’s plot.
In the new NBC comedy, Thompson plays a widowed father of two girls trying to balance work with life as a single dad. In real life, the actor is also a father to two daughters, sharing 6-year-old Georgia Marie and 2-year-old Gianna Michelle with wife Christina Evangeline, 31.
When host Jimmy Fallon asked Thompson what his wife thought about the sitcom’s storyline, the Saturday Night Live star joked that she “didn’t love it.”
“She was like, ‘Oh, so I’m dead?’ But, I mean, she was just giving me a hard time,” Thompson said. “But I was like, ‘Yeah … it’s not you, you know what I mean? It’s a show. It’s a different thing.'”
Explaining that the show does reflect his life “a little bit” when it comes to “being a father of two girls,” Thompson said it is still “totally different” from his real life.
“I’m the host of Atlanta’s No. 2 morning show and just trying to balance that work-life relationship and raising my girls without my best friend and partner. I hadn’t really seen that … kind of explored in a sitcom before,” he told Fallon, 46, of the show’s plot.
On Tuesday, the comedian continued to promote his new show with anappearance on Today, telling viewers that while he “mirrored” some of his own experiences with fatherhood in the series script, much of it boiled down to “creative liberty.”
“My wife, thank God she’s still with me,” he said on Today.
According to the show’s official synopsis, the single-camera comedy follows Kenan as he “tries to reclaim his life after his wife’s death” while “his father-in-law (Don Johnson), brother (Chris Redd) and co-workers all have strong opinions on the best way to live his life.”
“He struggles to balance parenting them as a single dad and hosting his show, which leads him to reluctantly accept help from his father-in-law, Rick,” the synopsis reads. “Rick was a gallivanting sax player when his daughter, Cori (Niccole Thurman), was young and missed out on a lot of her childhood, so he is aiming to make that up with his granddaughters, although his old-school parenting style does not often match up to Kenan’s.”
Kenan has been putting in work for 20+ years — so it’s great to see he’s finally getting his own show. ‘Kenan’ premieres Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. ET on NBC.
