How NBC’s Happy’s Place Differs From Reba — Grade the Premiere and Get Scoop on What Happens Next

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Like the WB classic Reba, NBC‘s Happy’s Place stars country music icon Reba McEntire and national treasure Melissa Peterman. But as far as series creator (and fellow Reba vet) Kevin Abbott is concerned, the similarities stop there.

Friday’s series opener introduces viewers to McEntire’s Bobbie, who inherits the titular tavern from her late father, and soon discovers that she has a new business partner — a twenty-something half-sister named Isabella (played by Hocus Pocus 2′s Belissa Escobedo) that she never knew she had. There’s also a bartender, Peterman’s Gabby, who is far more self-sufficient than Barbra Jean, but just as needy as her former, far more kooky alter-ego.

“We wanted to be careful and not just copy the old Reba show because we wanted to bring a freshness to it,” Abbott tells TVLine. That said, “we didn’t want to lose the best part of it [which is] Melissa loves Reba, and Reba loves Melissa. You want to tap into that. The difference in this one is that Gabby is not ‘the other woman.’ There’s not that huge resentment factor. The comedic premise behind Reba was, here’s the other woman that Reba did not like, yet this woman really thought that they were best friends. In this situation, Gabby is a person who Bobbie genuinely likes, she just drives her nuts. The Gabby character needs attention, needs validation, and looks to Bobbie [for it]. But she also looks to everybody else.”
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Another big difference between Reba and Happy’s Place is that Bobbie isn’t necessarily maternal. “Reba was caretaker for everybody in the old show,” Abbott points out. “It was built around the idea that she was taking care of her pregnant teenage daughter. She was maternal, she took care of Brock and Barbra Jean… even when Kira went over to live with them, she accepted that because she knew that it was best for everybody. Her interests were always what was best for everybody. In this show, she gets to be a bit more selfish.

“It still has that family element in the sense of these people love each other but they drive each other crazy, but Bobbie is not in charge of everybody else’s lives,” the EP explains. “It is adults interacting with each other, versus adults interacting with children — or adults that act like children. Very often [on a sitcom] you have the dumb character, and one could argue that Reba had Van, Cheyenne and Barbra Jean.” The characters in Happy’s Place — which also include tavern cook Emmett (Young Sheldon’s Rex Linn), waiter Takoda (Yellowstone’s Tokala Black Elk) and accountant Steve (Alaska Daily’s Pablo Castelblanco) — “are fully actualized people who have their quirks and their oddities, but Bobbie is not mothering them.”

Nixed Reba Revival Morphed Into Happy’s Place
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Below, Abbott weighs in on the pilot’s big twist — that Happy, despite not being present in Isabella’s life, kept one of her childhood drawings — and where the sitcom goes from here.

TVLINE | Happy had one of Isabella’s drawings hung up in his office, but we don’t know how he got it. As far as we know, Isabella didn’t have a relationship with their him. Are we going to find out more about Isabella’s mother, and what her relationship was like with Happy?
Yes. As a matter of fact, we are breaking that story right now. I like to slow-play these things a bit, give dribs and drabs, but Maritza is the name is Isabella’s mom, and we will find out what that entire situation was with Happy — what he did, and why he did it. For Bobbie and Isabella, the key question is: Was it love or was it lust? Isabella would prefer that it was love, Bobbie would prefer that it was lust. I think one of the interesting dynamics [at play] is that Isabella and Bobbie really care for each other, yet there is always going to be that thing [that Bobbie says] in the pilot — “When you look at me, you see the father you wish you had. When I look at you, I lose the father I thought I had” — so there is conflict that is built in.

TVLINE | There are a couple of other characters that are mentioned but not featured in Episode 1. We know that Bobbie has a daughter named Gracie, who is currently deployed. There’s also mention of Bobbie’s former husband, though it’s unclear whether he’s just an ex, or if he has died.
That is clarified [in a future episode]. Travis is her ex-husband who passed away 10 years ago, so it is not a current wound. As funny as death is, I didn’t want it to be all about death. We will find out that Bobbie came to work at Happy’s tavern after her husband died. We’re [also] doing a really funny episode with her daughter Gracie [played by United States of Al’s Elizabeth Alderfer], filling in some of the backstory, and seeing what Gracie’s reaction is to having Isabella as an aunt that is a little bit younger than her.

 
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TVLINE | The first episode takes place exclusively inside Happy’s tavern. Moving forward, is that where the majority of episodes will take place — à la Cheers?
Cheers was my absolute favorite show. That was my spec that I wrote way back in the day that got me in the business, so it does have a bit of a Cheers vibe because I love that vibe — that welcoming vibe where, you know, “everybody knows your name.” And I do intend to have most of the action take place in the tavern, especially the first season. But in the second episode, Isabella moves in with Bobbie… we have Gabby’s home, which is interesting… and we have a fishing shack that we go to in one of the episodes. But it will probably be 70/30 tavern and somewhere else.

What did you think of NBC’s Happy’s Place? Grade the first episode, then leave your review in Comments.