Boston Celtics fans are about to get rare insight into the family life of the team's majority owner, Wyc Grousbeck — his real-life blended family is the subject of "Extended Family," a new sitcom debuting this weekend on NBC.
The show is about a couple who flip the script on the traditional divorce, where the parents are the ones coming and going from the house while their kids stay, rather than have the kids be the ones going back and forth.
"They were going smoothly," star Jon Cryer said in an interview, but then "the owner of Jim's favorite sports team just happens to fall in love with his ex-wife."
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In the show, as in real life, the team is the Boston Celtics. When they got divorced, Emilia Fazzalari and George Geyer decided to ease the burden they'd seen other couples place on kids though what they came to call the "nest," the house where the kids live full time and the parents alternate staying with them.
"If you can remove that, we thought it'd be a lot easier on them and the pain would be on us instead of them," Geyer told The Boston Globe.
Once Fazzalari and Grousbeck committed to each other, Geyer "welcomed me into the family," Grousbeck told The Boston Globe in the Globe's interview.
In fact, Grousbeck, his wife and her ex wrote the treatment for the show together, they told the Globe. And the production involves the bigger Boston sports family as well — Red Sox Chairman Tom Werner, also a TV producer who helmed "The Crosby Show," "Roseanne" and more, and helped produce the show. Grousbeck, Fazzalari and Geyer are producers as well.
Along with Cryer, who has Geyer's role in the group, "Extended Family" stars Abigail Spencer (in Fazzalari's shoes) and Donald Faison (as the Celtics owner), with local comic legend Lenny Clarke making an appearance as well.
The show debuts on NBC Saturday at 8 p.m., after the Bengals–Steelers NFL game, before moving to its regular time slot, Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. It will stream on Peacock as well.
NBC is part of our parent company, NBCUniversal. The Celtics have a minority ownership stake in NBC Sports Boston.