The Goldbergs is a semi-autobiographical sitcom based on the life of Actor Adam Goldberg.  Think The Wonder Years set in the 1980s, but more hahaha silly laughs and less genuine sentimentality.  I didn’t really dislike it by any means, but when you’re shooting for The Wonder Years, you’re going to fall woefully short every time.  Although putting Patton Oswalt in the Daniel Stern narrator role is a nice choice.  Young Adam carries around a huge camcorder with him everywhere to document his life and that of his family’s.  The pilot focuses on the middle child’s attempt to learn how to drive.

The hysterical Curb Your Enthusiasm has pretty much trained me like a seal over the years to laugh at Jeff Garlin’s exasperated fat man schtick, so whenever he starts hollering and calling people morons, I have a Pavlovian response to it.  Jeff Garlin is great.  Wendi McLendon-Covey(RENO 911) plays the matriarch of the Goldberg clan and is clearly the pants wearer in the family, but it’s when Grandpa shows up that I lose my shit.  Peter Segal as a super horned up old man.  I sincerely thought he was either dead or retired.  Segal rocks the party, man.  But he’s starting to go senile and it’s when he drives his grandsons into a hamburger joint, literally right through it, that his children take his keys away and decide it’s time for their son to learn how to drive.

The Goldbergs wrung enough genuine laughter from me that I think I will remain a viewer.  Not to mention, as a child of the 80s, I’m a total sucker for 80s nostalgia and references, which this show has in spades(REO Speedwagon!, ALF, Simon!).  That was probably my favorite throwaway joke of the pilot.  when the easily frustrated older brother loses at Simon and punches it calling it a liar.

6/10