Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean in American Classic, a new light comedy about a once-promising theater star who comes home to Millersburg after his mother’s unexpected death and immediately tries to outrun both grief and the life he left behind. Richard plans to leave before the funeral. Instead, he ends up deciding to stage it at the family theater.
That turn gives the series its first real pressure point. Richard was once thought to be the future of American theatre, but viral footage has already made him a public joke: he is shown drunkenly lashing out at a New York Times critic over a bad review of his King Lear performance. When he learns the news from his brother Jon Bean, the old swagger starts to look a lot less like confidence and a lot more like panic.
Millersburg is a small hometown, but it is also the center of the Beans’ history. The Millersburg Festival Theater, founded by the family, now stages dinner theatre instead of original productions, a quiet marker of how far things have fallen. Jon stays in town with his wife Kristen and their family, while Kristen, played by Laura Linney, serves as the mayor. Linus Bean is in the early-plus stages of dementia, which gives the homecoming a layer of urgency Richard cannot talk his way around.
The friction comes from what Richard says he wants to do next. He declares that he will restore the theater’s fortunes by producing, directing, and possibly starring in Thornton Wilder’s play. He also admits, with the bluntness of a man cornered by his own self-mythology, that he is “not trusting the material.” Another line lands harder: “I’m sacrificing everything for cheap spectacle.” For a character who built his name on being taken seriously, the joke is that he cannot stop performing even when the situation calls for something else.
The series is created and written by Michael Hoffman and Bob Martin, and it is being framed as comfort TV with shades of Ted Lasso and Schitt’s Creek. Tony Shalhoub appears as Alvy, who calls Richard “still a meme,” a line that neatly captures the gap between the man Richard thinks he is and the one everyone else already sees. What happens next will depend on whether he can turn that embarrassment into a rescue act, or whether Millersburg becomes the place where his last grand performance finally runs out of stagecraft.
