Living with Fran

After having a nervous breakdown, 25-year-old Josh Reeves gets booted from medical school. So he decides to go back home. So when he arrives, Josh discovers his mother Fran Reeves has gotten over her divorce and starts a new relationship with a hunky and young man named Riley. Josh also finds out that Riley is 6 months Junior to him. Also Josh discovers his room to be a gym, and Joshs walk in closet now belongs to Rileys buddy Duane. And Joshs bratty young teenage sister loves her new life style. At Frans urging, Josh must learn to become a part of his new ""family.""

When Fran is planning a family vacation her ex-husband Ted pays the family a visit. Ted comes beacuse he is trying to buy is family back by, trying to mend his relationship with Josh, buying Allison gifts and offering Riley a job he cant refuse. The whole family including Riley seems charmed by Ted, but the only one that is not charmed is Fran. Fran does not want her children to get hurt by their father again. Also Josh gets a job at a video store.

Fran wants Riley to feel like part of the family, so she decides to start their own family album and is taken aback when Riley mentions adding pictures of their kids one day. Also Josh is comforted when Fran reassures him that being pregnant with him was the best thing that could have happened. So Riley gets his first taste of fatherhood when Allison starts to have boy problems.

Disapproving of Rileys plans for their first Valentines Day together, Fran makes a few changes with out consulting Riley, making him feel that Fran controls the relationship. Also Fran does not know that Josh wants to break up with his girlfriend Lilly, so Fran advises her on how to win him over. And Frans advice to Allison to pursue her secret admirer backfires when the secret admirers identity is revealed.

After family night charades were a walkover for the girls, Fran is eager to find something Riley and Josh can do - in order to grow closer together, so when he has a construction vacancy, she decides her lover obviously hires her son, never mind neither darling wants that. Both boys try terribly hard, but Josh is as gifted for construction work (roofing, in this case) as Hitler for equality programs. After a long day, Riley tells Fran he just cant keep such an incompetent worker on, and having hired Joshua she should fire him, but she just cant. Only after an extremely painful accident, which hits Riley by cascade from shoulder to nuts, Fran puts the father son job out of its misery, or was that the wrong way to look at it after all?

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Ryan built a shoe-carousel for his six months anniversary with Fran, so what can she give him? She goes for strip- classes, from obviously queer dance instructor Allan. Josh expects a surprise for his birthday on Sunday, so when she asks him to make himself scarce on Saturday for a girls book club -actually to strip for Ryan- he assumes thats to be his surprise party. Ryan loves his self-unwrapping present, till Josh walks in on them. Alisons unorthodox self-expressive school project has Fran, Ryan and Josh visit the principal- its a piñata in the shape of the team mascot, which spills not just peppermints but also condoms, as a protest that the school budget for sex seduction was cut to pay for new athletic equipment. After witnessing the atypical family dynamics, which they all defend, Josh not quite, Sir decides she turned out better then could be expected and lets her off.

After Fran embarrassed Josh by telling his former schoolmate Barry Regal, now in Wall Street, the med school drop-out is the video stores assistant-manager, everybody goes to the bar mitzvah of a certain Kenny Goldstein. Alas Frans ex, Dr. Ted Reeves, is there too, badmouthing Fran and Josh and out-staging her hunk Riley with professional model and dancer Rachel Hunter. The united front gives Ted as good as it gets, but back home it hits Fran: so long after Teds leaving, is he still a valid excuse for their own failures?

When Fran tells Ryan she is has no clue about all financial aspects of her interior decorating business, he suggests she should consider taking a business class, like Josh. To both boys horror she takes that as joining Joshs class in college. As if Frans boisterous style werent embarrassing enough, so Josh pretends to be an unrelated Re-e-ves, she manages to cheat all too loud at desperately innocent Josh during the first marketing pop quiz, so both are thrown out. Allison has a new boyfriend, Todd, who is charming, bright, polite, slick- Ryan instantly hates him, even more then Fran, who considers Todd a younger version of her nasty ex Ted. If teacher Bryant thought he had seen the last of the Reeve students, thats only because he didnt know her tenacity- yet.

Rileys mother Donna called five times before his naive kid sister Jenny arrives, and she sure is a pot-plant, still engaged to Jeremy, her first boy-friend ever since Kindergarten. Josh and Allison make fun of Jenny, Fran takes her shopping as the girlish daughter she never had, to be told her taste is too slutty. Fran sends Josh to show Jenny New York, but they only return after a night when they accidentally got married as drunk wedding witnesses for a couple they just met in a bar. Riley and Fran blame each-other as bad examples. Choosing a legal reason for annulment is painful for poor crazy Josh.

Fran insists till Riley allows reporter Catherine Johnson to write a piece on them as a couple, supposedly as publicity for their businesses, in the local newspaper Long Island Life. Just then Frans ex Ted drops by to give Alison a driving lesson, but is too proud to decline helping Riley move the couch and gets a heart attack. Because Riley feels guilty even though he couldnt know, they take the recovering bachelor in at home. Josh finally sees a chance to get back at the ever abusive dad from hell when nurse Stacy declines Teds flirting but eagerly goes out with Josh. When the reporter arrives, everything goes embarrassingly wrong.

Its Halloween, so Josh is eager to get Riley and Fran out of the house, so he can entertain his present girlfriend Tina. It goes great, till the police drops off devilish sister Allison, only because all cells are full, for driving to a party -she told Fran that Todd drove- without ever having had a license. Meanwhile Riley learns to his light shock Fran has brought him to a costume party -he makes a very cute Indiana Jones- without invitation, as earlier to a funeral, so she can hunt for interior decoration customers. Alas one of the guests, bar-girl Beth, throws champagne in Rileys face, so Fran, who throws drama scenes as if he were Bluebeard, tails him, learns he lived nearly two years with Beth and stood her up at the altar... Josh decides to put Allison on the worst slave duties he can think up till she rather tells ma herself.

When a waitress flirts with Riley at Frans birthday dinner, adding she can see where Josh got his good looks, Fran is down and gets nightmares about all the Reeves family being ancient, fat and ugly, only Ryan still seems a young god at 70. When Riley gets her to see a gynecologist, the verdict is a hysterectomy, which stops her PMS, even if it starts menopause. Ted does the operation which goes well, everyone is at her bedside, but after a nightmare about Riley wasting his young life to take care of her, she breaks up unilaterally, pretending he now makes her feel old.