A wreck of a family with some bad lines

Just quarter of an hour in, the Oh What Perfect Days family of TV2's The Days (tonight, 7.30) were left staring at the aftermath of the car crash that was their nice upper middle-class life.

That this was coming couldn't have been better signalled had there been a little man waving a red flag in the corner of the screen.

The Days is narrated by middle child Cooper, a grunge-gear-wearing teenager who lives in a pit of a room and obsessively writes his diary on his laptop. Cooper, who communicates in that teenage-speak of sneer and sarcasm, writes that "the perk of my incarceration" in the family home "is the material provided by my blissfully clueless family".

Coop dreams of the day he drives out of the burbs to a loft in Soho where he will write his spectacularly successful first novel based on his family.

Not if whoever wrote the script has anything to do with it.

The Days is really just a striving-for-cool remake of two other American telly shows with the word Days in their titles.

From Happy Days it takes its laugh-and-learn theme; from Days of Our Lives the old cry-and-learn philosophy of not very good TV.

Cooper, for all his self-imposed observer status, is no Holden Caulfield. Try as Cooper might to convince us, and himself, otherwise, he really doesn't think his family are phonies like the Caulfield character did in J.D. Salinger's groundbreaking novel Catcher in the Rye (1951).

When he learns that perfect sister Natalie, with her picture-perfect skin and her David Beckham ability at soccer, is up the duff, good old Coop picks a fight with the father of sis's baby.

He gives his little brother Nathan, with his "off the planet IQ" and his panic attacks, advice on how to woo a little girlfriend. Because for all his posturing, Coop really cares.

You could not accuse The Days of mucking about when it comes to setting up the storylines. But where do you go once you've established that corporate lawyer Dad has had an attack of conscience and quit his high-paying job on the same day that geek kid Nathan has a panic attack in the middle of an exam, that perfect daughter discovers she's pregnant, that perfect high-achieving ad exec mom discovers she's pregnant?

You write really bad lines. Mom: "The only difference between us and The Osbournes is that they get paid."

And stage a near car crash between Mom's car and Dad's car to signify that this family's life is a bit of a wreck.

Natalie asks: "What will happen next?"

Oh, probably more lines like this one from Mom: "Take some time to listen to your heart ... and your mother."

And more mother/daughter bonding, more father/son bonding, more laughing and learning and crying and learning.