Here’s a fresh approach to daddy-daughter problems:
He had too much alcohol and too many absences. She avoided him. “The only way these two were going to heal their relationship was on the set of their own NBC sitcom,” Debby Wolfe said.
Now that show is here. “Lopez vs. Lopez” (shown here) debuts at 8 p.m. Friday (Nov. 4) on NBC; Wolfe created it, with George and Mayan Lopez playing versions of themselves that are exaggerated – a little.
“There was a time when we didn’t speak and were estranged for about three years,” Mayan told the Television Critics Association. That split, George said, “was so painful and so much my fault.”
In the show, Mayan is a veterinarian who’s good to her employees, her husband and their son. Her dad has run out of money and chances; now he hopes to stay with her during a slow kitchen restoration.
“I’ve made some mistakes,” he said. “I’d like to think Mayan hasn’t done everything perfectly.”
Perhaps, but that’s for later. “Lopez vs. Lopez” is about a guy who needs to make amends.
Lopez knows the territory. His low point came in 2014, when he passed out on floor of a casino in Windsor, Canada. He told Howard Stern a month later that he’d been drunk 17 tequila shots.
“I had a lot of those nights,” he told Stern, “but nobody had really seen it. That was a sign that (it) had to end.” He told several interviewers that he was done drinking.
Lopez did later open his own brewery and talked in 2020 about his favorite beers. By then, his relationship with Mayan was being slowly patched.
“Really, the pandemic brought us back together,” she said. “I started making TikToks with my family, to reconnect. And Debby Wolfe was scrolling one day and saw one.”
This chaos is surprising, because George Lopez had spoken so passionately about family bonds.
When he was born, his mother was 20, “a wild, mixed-up streak of a girl,” he wrote in “Why You Crying?” (Touchstone, 2004), Her husband vanished two months later.
He soon was being raised by a grandmother who, he wrote, “took an old-world approach, where everything is bad and everyone untrusting. Positive emotion simply does not flow in her bloodstream.”
As a young man, he wrote, he was “the angriest, most depressed man alive.” Somehow, he emerged from that as a popular stand-up comedian with a successful sitcom.
“From that cold,cruel house,” he wrote in 2004, “I’ve walked into the warm, welcoming embrace of my wife of 10 years and our 8-year-old daughter. The best nights are spent at father-daughter dances, parent -teacher conferences or just snuggled up with Ann and Mayan, watching ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’”
The next year, Ann gave him a kidney; six years later, they were divorced. Eventually, the relationship with Mayan also shattered.
“I used to give up on people,” George told the TCA, “whether it was my fault or not …. But this is the one relationship that is the most valuable thing to me. It was very difficult to look at (my) flawed self.”
Wolfe, a Latina, was previously a writer-producer on the “One Day at a Time” reboot. Working with her is Bruce Helford, who ran comedy shows for Roseanne Barr, Drew Carey, Wanda Sykes … and Lopez. “The pool for casting and writing a show about (Latinos) is hugely different now,” he said.
They have Selenis Leyva (“Orange is the New Black”) as Lopez’s ex-wife and Matt Snively (who played kids on “True Jackson VP,” “The Real O’Neals,” etc.) as Mayans’ WASPy husband.
Neither of those roles is based on real life, Wolfe said. But George and Mayan offer heightened versions of the rough Lopez-vs.-Lopez years.