Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 3, 2026
Kevin Kline has been acting steadily his entire career, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him in anything. His career peaked in the late ’80s and ’90s with a trio of outstanding comedies — A Fish Called Wanda, Dave, and In and Out — but things haven’t been quite the same since he was paired with Will Smith in the box-office flop Wild Wild West. He is, however, a tremendously gifted actor — the rare recipient of an Oscar for a comedic performance — and it is an absolute joy to see him in American Classic, a new series from MGM+ and, with all due respect to From, the best reason currently to subscribe.
The bones of American Classic will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time with shows like Brockmire or even Chad Powers. It’s a redemption arc centered on Richard Bean (Kline), a celebrated Shakespearean actor coasting on his reputation, who lands a scathing review in the New York Times. In response, he drunkenly upbraids the critic — and the critic’s boyfriend — in a spectacularly public and embarrassing restaurant confrontation. It’s all captured on an iPhone, it goes viral, and Richard Bean suddenly has a very serious PR mess on his hands.
Meanwhile, Richard’s mother passes away. While he’s on a forced hiatus and his manager, Alvy (Tony Shalhoub), scrambles to do damage control, Richard returns home for the funeral and is reunited with his estranged family, who own the small-town playhouse where his career began. Much has changed in his absence. His sister-in-law, Kristen (Laura Linney), has been forced to convert the playhouse into a dinner theater just to keep the lights on. Before she married Richard’s brother Jon (Jon Tenney), Kristen and Richard were partners both onstage and romantically — until Richard got famous and essentially left her behind to tend the flame. Kristen, now also the town’s mayor, has never quite forgiven him for it.
The friction between them is considerable, further complicated by the fact that Richard’s niece Miranda (Nell Verlaque) idolizes her uncle and desperately wants to follow him into acting — a dream Kristen is determined to extinguish in favor of a sensible college education. Rounding out the domestic chaos is Richard’s father, who is living with dementia, doesn’t yet know his wife has died, and has been coming out as gay to everyone in town on a more or less daily basis for the past month.
Richard, being Richard, decides to turn his mother’s funeral into a grand theatrical event, hosting a celebration at the playhouse. And because he is a magnificent narcissist who also — perhaps — genuinely wants to save both his career and the theater he once abandoned, he uses the eulogy to announce that he’s returning to stage a production of Our Town, which will, of course, inevitably pair him with Kristen once more.
That’s the setup. I should add that American Classic is a half-hour dramedy — considerably more comedy than drama — and it is genuinely, consistently funny. But it’s also something more than that: a love letter to theater, a meditation on family, and an examination of small towns and the slow death of culture within them. In spirit, it’s reminiscent of that magnificent Canadian series Slings and Arrows, though it carves out its own tender, warm-hearted identity.
Kevin Kline and Laura Linney are, simply put, perfection together. It’s a marvellous little delight. And given that Kline — who somehow looks a decade and a half younger than his 78 years — isn’t getting any younger, we’d do well to treasure every opportunity we get to watch him work at this level. I cannot recommend American Classic highly enough.
