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Ricardo Chavira (Miguel Hernandez) is best known for his role on Desperate Housewives as Carlos Solis, playing Eva Longoria's husband. He also has a long list of guest roles on shows such as George Lopez, 24, Six Feet Under, JAG, and NYPD Blue.

Justina Machado (Lisette Hernandez) is known for her role as Vanessa on Six Feet Under. She also starred as Sunny in the short-lived drama series Missing. Recently, she had a recurring role on Private Practice. She has guest starred in a long list of shows, including Ugly Betty, Cold Case, Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and Body of Proof.

Ella Rae Peck (Molly Yoder) has guest starred in several shows, including Without a Trace, Law & Order, The Good Wife, and Gossip Girl. Her first starring role came this past winter on NBC's Deception.

Joey Haro (Junior Hernandez) is best known for his recurring roles on Awkward and Glee. Welcome to the Family is his first starring role in a series.

Fabrizio Guido (Demetrio Hernandez) made his big screen debut opposite Brad Pitt in the summer blockbuster World War Z. He discovered his love of acting at a young age, landing small parts in a variety of film and television projects, including several TV movies. One of his early roles was playing Drew McNeil on Grey's Anatomy.

Pilot Plot:

"Pilot" (airs Thursday, October 3 at 8:30 PM ET/PT)

Dan and Caroline's daughter has just graduated high school, and they're ready to send her off to college and start focusing on themselves again. Molly's boyfriend, Junior, is graduating from his high school with top honors and has plans to go to Stanford, to the high pride of his parents. Everything seems like it is falling into place for all but unbeknownst to both of the families, Molly and Junior are about to become parents themselves. Once the teens break the big news, these two very different families are suddenly thrown together, which goes anything but smoothly.

Analysis:

When I first read the logline for Welcome to the Family when NBC picked it up in May, I remember groaning. Really? A sitcom about the culture clash when a Hispanic and a Caucasian family are forced to meet? We're really doing sitcoms about this? In 2013? It seemed to invite all of the worst possible stereotypes, and I immediately braced myself for yet another sitcom that gets all of its "laughs" from cheap shock humor and "satirical" racism. Because one 2 Broke Girls just isn't enough, apparently. But when I watched the pilot, I was pleased that it subverted my expectations. The cheap humor I feared was almost completely absent, and most of the characters managed to resist the easy stereotypes the show could've easily pinned them as. If absolutely nothing else, Welcome to the Family wasn't the racist mess it easily could've been.

Honestly, though...that's about the only nice thing I can say about it. It's not racist! Yay! But it's really boring, and feels kind of empty, which is strange for a show dealing with topics as potentially heavy as this one. I think it feels empty because the characters are so weak – in fact, they're hardly characters at all as much as they are stock personalities. Nothing about them feels natural – Mike O'Malley's character is an old-fashioned type, blue-collar dad, because of course he is. His wife is his level-headed and supportive companion, because that's what TV wives are supposed to be. His daughter is ditzy, and oh, she's also a raging feminist, because why not? That's a personality quirk that characters have sometimes. Why is she a feminist? Well, that would require some deep digging that Welcome to the Family doesn't seem capable of or even interested in doing. Junior and his family aren't much better – he's an Ivy Leauge-bound brainiac and his dad is a tough-minded macho man and his wife is his level-headed and supportive companion...hey, that sounds familiar, doesn't it? Everything here just feels so overly calculated, from the characters to the paint-by-numbers plot even to the painfully generic "quirky!" music cues that the show places in between scenes. The only thing that isn't calculated is the jokes – because there's none of them. I didn't laugh once, and I'd struggle to identify points where I was even supposed to be laughing. The show feels a little bit like a script that was supposed to get punched up by a writers' room, but never actually made it to that stage.

True, lots of sitcom pilots have stock characters and generic plots, and most aren't very funny. But most sitcom pilots - the ones worth a damn, anyway – have at least a suggestion of a purpose, of something there beneath the surface. What makes me so unconfident that Welcome to the Family will overcome its issues and turn into anything worthwhile is the fact that it feels like there's nothing beneath its overly generic surface at all.

The best thing I can say about this show is that it's not as terrible as I thought it'd be going in. Or at least, it's not the same kind of terrible I thought it'd be going in. If you're afraid this show is going to be the cloying racism-fest its premise suggests it might be, then you'll be relieved to know that it's not that at all. But it is really boring, with painfully generic stock characters and a premise it doesn't seem to know how to deal with. There's an interesting sitcom to be made about teen pregnancy, and even an interesting sitcom to be made out of the cultural identities that are occasionally hinted at here, but Welcome to the Family would rather just coast along in its blandness, never allowing itself to be anything more than a sitcom that's as safe and generic as they come.