Jon Hamm: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

4. Richard Povich - What About Brian

Nowadays JJ Abrams is something approaching nerd royalty. He's the man who convinced everyone to put all their stock in Lost's myriad mysteries, even though none of them paid off. He's the director who was entrusted with (and was successful in) rebooting the Star Trek franchise on the big screen. He's now the one responsible for making sure a new Star Was trilogy gets off to a good start. Before he had fingers in every sci-fi pie going, though, he was more known for producing pretty trite and terrible network sitcoms which got cancelled after a couple of seasons and are remembered fondly only through rose-tinted specs by people who actively pine for the nineties as if anything good came out of that wretched decade's pop culture.

What About Brian was a weird exception to this rule, since Abrams was already appearing on geek radars by the time it started its two season run on ABC. The comedy-drama centred on 32-year-old Brian Davis, the only bachelor left in his group of friends who, obviously, ends up becoming obsessed with finding a wife. There's actually a lot of parallels with Friends With Kids, as the married lives of his pals end up being less rosy than expected. It's just that Friends With Kids does it a lot better. And that actually starred Jon Hamm, whileas this features him as single dad Richard Povich, who has a brief romance with one of the characters, whilst sporting an ill-advised floppy fringe and a fairly rote performance that belies his later, award-winning work.