The ABC sitcom It's All Relative had its roots in the 1920s Broadway hit Abie's Irish Rose, which chronicled the trials and tribulations of an Irish-Jewish married couple and their constantly warring parents. This time around, the wedding-bound duo were Boston bartender Bobby (Reid Scott) and Harvard medical student Liz (Maggie Lawson). Though deeply in love and committed to one another, Bobby and Liz were saddled with parents who just plain couldn't see eye to eye on anything. Bobby's blue-collar dad and mom, Mace and Audrey O'Neill (Lenny Clarke and Harriet Harris), were the Irish-Catholic, conservative-Republican owners of a Boston pub. As for Liz, she had two "daddies," wealthy gay art-gallery owner Philip (John Benjamin Hickey) and his life partner, Simon (Chris Sieber). Gloriously anti-PC, the series showed that the gay couple were equally as intolerant of the "straight" O'Neills as the O'Neills were of them. And avoiding the usual "old people can't do it anymore" sitcom cliché, it was obviously that both sets of parents enjoyed robust sex lives. Created by Anne Flett-Giordano and Chuck Ranberg and produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron of Chicago fame, It's All Relative proved an instant winner when the series joined the ABC Tuesday-night lineup on October 1, 2003.
by Hal Erickson
synopsis
