Starring Peter Falk and Paul Reiser. Rated PG. Opens Friday, October 14, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Now that everyone has decided that TV (the cable kind) is better than Hollywood product (the big kind, anyway), that shouldn't mean movies have to start looking like TV. But such is the case with The Thing About My Folks, a long-form Very Special Episode of a sitcom that somehow never got on the air.

Written and produced by Paul Reiser, and rather glumly directed by hired gun Raymond De Felitta (Two Family House), the film is clearly a vehicle for Reiser's hero, Peter Falk. The John Cassavetes and Columbo veteran plays paterfamilias Sam Kleinman, whose reward for a lifetime of self-absorption is to find that his wife (Olympia Dukakis, in a brief appearance) has suddenly flown the coop after roughly 50 years.

This is learned by Sam's sole son, magazine journalist Ben (Reiser, at his most fusty), and Ben's wife (an underused Elizabeth Perkins) when the old man suddenly shows up at their Manhattan apartment. Next thing you know, Ben's many and largely undifferentiated sisters are having noisy conference calls that go nowhere. Eventually, Ben decides to take his dad upstate, ostensibly to look at some genteel property he wants to buy (gee, those freelance writers must make a lot of dough) but really so the rest of the movie can be one of those father-and-son road trips in which the sensible Volvo is dumped in favour of a sporty maroon Ford Deluxe from 1940-a convertible, of course.

These caveats are not intended to suggest that there is no pleasure to be gained from watching an old pro like Falk go through even such routine paces. But, jeez, a poolhall fight that ends with a pool cue to two groins? Like, we have to pay for parking to see this? In the end, My Folks reaches for sentiment it hasn't earned, and it suggests that years of bad husbandry can be blown away by a few heart-to-hearts and a road trip. Well, yeah, maybe if the missus went for the ride.