‘The Real O’Neals’ Pilot Recap: A Perfect Family Spills Its Darkest Secrets

The Real O’Neals is the newest comedy sitcom that shares the story of the All-American, churchgoing, Irish-Catholic family. In the premiere, we soon find out that the “perfect” family has plenty of secrets to unveil.

‘The Real O’Neals’ Pilot Recap

The eldest son, Jimmy (Matt Shively), plays football and the youngest. Shannon (Bebe Wood) is charitable. Their dad, Pat (Jay R. Ferguson), is a cop and his wife, Eileen (Martha Plimpton), is heavily involved at church. It doesn’t get more old-fashioned American than this.

Eileen is the chair for the Bingo Bananza event at church. In preparation for the event, she has guests over to set up raffle prizes.

Kenny (Noah Galvin), the middle child, is secretly gay and terrified to come out. Kenny is covering up his sexuality with a girlfriend who is pressuring him to have sex. As Eileen and fellow parishioners prepare prizes downstairs, her son is upstairs trying to flush every condom in sight down the toilet. The toilet clogs up and overflows while his mother is downstairs with guests.

Word travels fast and after the toilet incident everyone thinks Eileen’s son has done the deed. With their family’s perfect reputation, she tries to get rid of the rumor.

Pat’s way of teaching his kids a lesson is taking them to work. He has Kenny sit down with a sex worker, who asks him why he wants to have sex with his girlfriend since he’s clearly gay.

At the Bingo Bananza event, we meet Eileen’s community enemy, Marcia Worthman.

Eileen sends Kenny to the nursery to take care of infants with his girlfriend. After being shell-shocked, he realizes he doesn’t want to have kids with her or any girl.

Kenny runs to find his father to admit he’s gay but Pat misunderstands and calls a family meeting before he can officially say it.

The honesty hour begins where we find out Eileen and Pat are in therapy, Jimmy’s anorexic and Shannon hasn’t sent over the donations to Ethiopia. After everyone shares their secrets, Kenny says he’s gay.

Their secret family meeting turns into a nightmare when the entire room of bingo players and churchgoers overhear their conversation.

The O’Neals quickly went from the “perfect family in the church bulletin to the ones sneaking out the back.”

Tune in to the next episode of The Real O’Neals Tuesday 8:30/7:30c on ABC.