It's Not Like That Episode 1 Review: Everyone Is Trying to Start Over Too Fast
What happens — the short version (spoilers)
- The first morning back is already too much
- Malcolm and Lori know exactly where to find each other
- The kids are not in the same recovery story
- IRL Match makes moving on feel public
- The TikTok account turns friendship into evidence
- The rain scene crosses the line before the adults can name it
The premiere builds its romantic-dramedy tension out of carpools, dating apps, school hallways, church pressure, and the terrible timing of adults who need comfort before their kids are ready to watch them need anything at all.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses the events of It’s Not Like That Season 1 Episode 1.
The first morning back is already too much
Episode 1 opens on a house where the day has started before anybody is emotionally dressed for it. Malcolm is trying to get everyone out the door by 7:30. Justin is protecting souffles like they are sacred cargo. Flora says she is going to walk. Penelope has other transportation. The ordinary chaos keeps letting the gaps show.
Malcolm tells Flora he is proud of her for going back. Lori later says Flora is back at school, and Malcolm says he wants to make sure it sticks. Everyone is performing a version of normal, but nobody is moving at the same speed.
Malcolm keeps trying to parent through logistics: breakfast, rides, doors, tracking, school drop-off, home visits, dinner plans. He can organize the day, but he cannot make the family arrive inside it together.
Malcolm and Lori know exactly where to find each other
The premiere’s central relationship begins in grief, divorce, and a phone call that feels too familiar to be casual. Malcolm is a widower. Lori’s marriage to David is over after 17 years. Jenny is gone, and Lori lost her too. When Malcolm jokes that he is overloaded on widower sympathy, Lori can laugh with him because she is not treating him like a church project.
That is the episode’s sharpest choice. Malcolm and Lori are not two shiny singles discovering attraction in a clean little vacuum. They are two exhausted people who have become each other’s emergency contact for feelings they cannot say anywhere else. He notices she is not wearing her ring. She says David told her to take hers off because they are not married anymore. He says he is experimenting. The exchange is funny because it is practical, and sad because neither of them knows the rules.
Their bond is intimate before it is romantic. She asks how badly she has scarred the kids. He says he would not have made it through the summer without her. Comfort can become dependence before anyone admits it.
The kids are not in the same recovery story
The adults want to believe routines will save everyone: school, cheer, wrestling, sermons, dinner, therapy. The kids spend the episode proving that routines can also expose the damage.
Flora goes back to school, but she is still being watched from all directions. Malcolm tracks her more than he wants to admit. Ms. Farrow tells her she is proud and says her mother would be proud, which sends Flora straight to the core problem: how would Ms. Farrow know?
Penelope, meanwhile, is trying on distance. She signs up for cheer with Dakota after apparently ghosting Casey all summer. Dakota’s blunt line about Penelope having a dead mother and being able to do whatever she wants is nasty, funny, and useful at once. It shows the social permission Penelope is being offered, and how quickly that permission can turn into cruelty.
Casey chooses wrestling instead of cheer. Lori backs her, but Casey is immediately stuck with Trevor throwing her around at practice. Merritt quits wrestling, breaks up with Jill, and refuses to explain himself. Justin is awake at 2 a.m. making Jenny’s meatloaf because his dad never has time to do it.
That is a brutal family portrait because nobody is having the same crisis, yet every crisis keeps bumping into the others.
IRL Match makes moving on feel public
Gail signing Lori up for IRL Match could have been broad comic relief, and it is funny. Lori being offended by “dating apps,” asking Malcolm to assess men, and landing on a profile named Cuppa Joe gives the episode a nice embarrassment engine. But the scene is doing more than laughing at dating.
Lori has been separated for six months. David joined IRL the day after he moved out. Casey sees her mother’s profile and is mature enough to say Lori is allowed to have a life, while also roasting the Cuppa Joe branding. The app makes adult longing visible to the kids, which is exactly what no one is ready for.
David’s side of the dating mess is harsher. He takes Malcolm to a bar where his DJ client is working, says a pastor is still a man, and admits he left Lori after getting sober and still feeling unhappy. He also says Jenny’s death pushed him to make a change because life is short. Malcolm’s correction, that the awful thing happened to Jenny, matters. David’s panic is real, but the timing of his freedom sits on top of everyone else’s loss.
Then Malcolm meets Marie and blurts out that his wife is dead. The line is painfully funny because it is honest and socially unusable. He is not ready to flirt in the language of people outside casseroles, condolences, and church expectations.
The TikTok account turns friendship into evidence
The Casey and Penelope rupture becomes concrete through the fake-laughing video. Penelope says it is private because Dakota’s spam account only has a few viewers. Casey’s parents ask Penelope if she knows who posted the TikTok, and she lies. Merritt immediately reads it as a lie, while Lori tries to defend Penelope because she promised Jenny she would look after her kids.
That promise has a cost. Merritt hears his mother apologizing for someone who hurt Casey. Lori hears her son say she lived in a happy fantasy world and maybe David would not have left if she had known he was going to. It is vicious, and the scene does not soften it by pretending teenagers only say what they mean. Merritt is angry, Casey is humiliated, Lori is blindsided, and Penelope is hiding in a bathroom taking pictures like the whole thing is content until it is not.
Penelope’s later choice with Dakota is one of the premiere’s cleanest small victories. She tells Dakota to take down the whole account or she will tell the truth. Then she uses Dakota’s own ugly logic back at her: she has a dead mother, remember? It is not sweet growth. It is a kid weaponizing the label everyone keeps placing on her, this time to protect Casey.
The rain scene crosses the line before the adults can name it
After Lori’s call with David, she and Malcolm meet in the rain and go out “like grownups,” except the whole point is that neither of them feels grown enough for what their lives are asking. Lori does not want dinner. She does not want to go home. She wants to sit somewhere with Malcolm and be angry without being judged.
Lori is angry that David wants a girlfriend and companionship when he is the reason she is alone. She misses Jenny, the person she could talk to about both men in her life. Then she says she does not want to be alone, and Malcolm answers in the same emotional register. Neither is talking only about general loneliness anymore.
The kiss is not treated like a prize. It is immediate, tender, and interrupted by reality almost as quickly as it happens. Justin calls because he needs help with homework, Penelope swore at him, and Flora will not leave her room. Malcolm goes home. Lori returns to Casey, who spots the missing earring. This is the kind of complication the show seems built for: two adults making one vulnerable choice in a world where children, grief, and custody schedules still need pizza.
Casey’s match and Malcolm’s sermon let everyone exhale
The final act gives the episode two public tests that actually move people forward. First, Lori helps Flora with her hair after Flora says her mom cuts it. That moment is quiet enough to hurt. Malcolm had read the hair as a style issue. Lori understands it as a grief issue.
Then Casey wrestles Trevor in the intra-squad match and wins. The cheering matters because it is not tidy family unity. David, Lori, Malcolm, and the kids are all around the mat carrying unresolved junk, but for a few minutes everyone knows what to do: yell for Casey. Penelope’s mouthed thank-you does not repair the friendship, but it gives the episode one honest stitch.
Malcolm’s return to the pulpit is even stronger. Pastor Harris introduces him with warmth, the congregation welcomes him, and Malcolm admits he does not have a sermon. He tells them he is not okay, that he has faith he will be, and that he needs the Grace community too. It is the right failure. He cannot preach a polished lesson about brokenheartedness while his own house is still full of locked doors, meatloaf, unanswered questions, and kids who do not all want church.
By the end, Lori rings Malcolm’s doorbell. He asks what they are going to do. She does not know. That is the only honest answer.
Tiny details worth clocking
Justin’s souffles in the opening and meatloaf at 2 a.m. make him the episode’s tiny domestic historian.
Penelope insisting on “Penelope” instead of “Pen” says plenty about the version of herself she is trying to force into existence.
David calling Marie a woman, not a girl, during his fight with Lori is a very David correction at the worst possible time.
Malcolm’s home visit with Steven quietly mirrors his own crisis: he is still capable of giving comfort while not knowing how to receive it.
Final verdict
It’s Not Like That starts with a confident sense of what kind of mess it wants to be. The premiere is not rushing toward romance as an escape hatch. It is building romance out of badly timed need, long friendship, family loyalty, and the horrible intimacy of being the one person someone can call when they have nowhere else to put themselves.
The kid material is just as important as the adult near-romance. Flora, Penelope, Justin, Casey, and Merritt all have specific wounds, not generic “children adjusting” beats. The comedy is best when it comes from people trying to behave normally while saying the worst possible honest thing.
The premiere is crowded, but in the way a first episode about two tangled families should be crowded. It knows the difference between moving on and moving too fast, and it makes that difference painfully funny.
Rating: 8.4/10 - A sharp premiere that turns grief, divorce, and one kiss into a messy family-romance setup with real bite.
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Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.