News flash, everyone: Rocky Balboa is a girl dad. I’ll say it again: Famous Hollywood tough guy Sylvester Stallone is a man with daughters!
This is essentially the premise of a new, very boring reality show—excuse me, docuseries—called The Family Stallone, which premiered this week on Paramount+. The series follows the home life of Hollywood icon Stallone while he’s filming yet another Paramount+ show called Tulsa King from that Yellowstone guy. (Of course.)
The series is also a coming-out of sorts for his three twentysomething daughters and former Miss Golden Globes(es), Sophia, Sistine, and Scarlet Stallone. The actor’s wife, Jennifer Flavin—who almost divorced him last year over a dog, allegedly—is also in the mix.
I say this as someone who devoured every episode of the heavily panned TLC reality show The Culpo Sisters and would happily watch the Kardashians clip their fingernails for an hour: The Family Stallone is very, very bad. It’s not even the sort of bad that I think I could convince my brain is good on an edible.
After watching the first two episodes, I immediately understood why this show is being marketed as a “docuseries” and not a “reality show.” Arguably, there are some formal differences between the two genres, although those lines have become more blurred these days. Above all, the phrase “reality show” automatically makes me think of a bunch of chaotic and hilarious televised moments. It invokes a legacy of trashiness, melodrama, absurdity, fun!
So far, The Family Stallone has delivered none of those things. Its only claim to outrageousness is Stallone’s eccentric brother Frank, whose home, we learn, is essentially a creepy shrine to his famous sibling. (I would prefer to know less about this man!) Everyone else is unbearably normal and gets along a little too well. The draw of capturing this particular family (aside from Stallone’s pre-existing relationship with Paramount) has yet to be seen.
At least in the case of The Culpo Sisters, there was some palpable tension within the central family—not just from sharing a living space but from the pressure of trying to elevate their C-list status. The same level of thirst made the early seasons of Keeping Up With the Kardashians reality TV gold.
The Stallone sisters, on the other hand, don’t seem like they’re trying to brand themselves in the same desperate way. While we’ll presumably see them tackle business ventures—one of the sisters is green-lighting an MGM film while the other two have a podcast—these are women who have lived comfortably their entire lives, already have over a million followers each on Instagram, and seemingly don’t need a half-hour Paramount+ series to propel them any further into the spotlight.
Likewise, The Family Stallone would be more immediately compelling if it wasn’t so much about Stallone as an overprotective patriarch. The series feels like it’s trying to serve two separate audiences: older fans of Stallone who are interested in him as a personality, and younger, Bravo-bred viewers like me who want to see women start businesses and be catty to each other. The older crowd ends up winning out, as Stallone is truly the star of the series.
Unfortunately, he’s not very charismatic and spends most of his time rolling his eyes at the fact that he’s filming a reality show. It’s also hard to swallow the whole “girl dad” persona from a man with a CVS-length receipt of sexual assault allegations. Plus, he’s just a very annoying parent.
The show’s biggest conflict off the bat is that Stallone’s daughters can’t bring their boyfriends around him because he always scares them off. He also refuses to hang out with their current ones. In the second episode, he convinces Sophia to break up with her long-distance boyfriend, whom she gushes about in a previous scene with her sisters. “Time is your currency,” Stallone tells her during an outing to a gun range, of all places. “You got to spend it in the right spot, or you will go bankrupt.” Um, she’s 26??
He also nearly has a heart attack when Sistine pranks him into thinking she’s pregnant during his birthday dinner. Overall, the whole “dad who can’t handle daughters becoming sexual beings” thing gets very old very fast.
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to stick to this show long enough to find out if it gets interesting, but wow, was the two-part premiere a snooze. I did, however, appreciate Al Pacino randomly popping up in a scene to have pizza with Stallone and marvel at the camera crew. Maybe this show should pivot to Stallone having lunch with actors from the ’70s—it’d probably be more entertaining than this.
