Simon reluctantly plays role model to Hadley's children from a different marriage: precocious 7+1⁄2-year-old Daniel (Luke Tarsitano) and angst-ridden teen Gwen (Marla Sokoloff).

The premise of the pilot was that Curry's character, actor Simon Ferguson, was fired from his soap opera, so he visited the quaint bed and breakfast in Upstate New York owned by his ex-wife, Kate (Potts), whom he was once married to for six months.

The cast was rounded out by Luke Tarsitano and Natanya Ross as Kate's children from a subsequent marriage, Debra Jo Rupp as the maid, and a then-unknown actor named Steve Carell as manic chef Yorgo.

Natanya Ross and Debra Jo Rupp were replaced by Marla Sokoloff and Liz Torres, and John O'Hurley's character was written into the show on a recurring basis.

"By shifting Soul Man's time slot for the first few weeks of the season," Tarses released in a public statement, "we're giving this pivotal series the luxury to recapture its audience without intense premiere competition."

Matt Roush wrote in his USA Today review that Curry "gives it his maul", and that the show's leads seemed "lost in the TV equivalent of summer stock".

[19] TeeVee's Peter Ko wrote a lengthy review (which itself got some publicity nine years later) in which he heavily bashed Curry, then he went on to state, "I have stood in a freezer full of dead people at the morgue.

Although the complete series barely aired anywhere in the world, all 12 episodes of the show that were filmed (including the original version of the pilot) were subsequently leaked and have been circulating among Curry's fans.

[citation needed] The series gained additional interest after Steve Carell became famous and mentioned it several times in interviews, particularly after reading an excerpt of Peter Ko's review during a 2006 Television Critics Association speech.