‘Newlyweds’ Gives Tim Daly and Téa Leoni a Honeymoon With a Twist

Back in the 1990s, Tim Daly and Tea Leoni were NBC sitcom mainstays on Wings and The Naked Truth, respectively. Now, they’re back on NBC as a couple (on-screen and in real life) in the new sitcom Newlyweds, which premiered on the network last month. Tonight, the newlyweds are headed on their honeymoon, and Collider is proud to present an exclusive sneak peek of it.

Newlyweds centers around Jeanie (Leoni), a middle school science teacher, and James (Daly), a philosophy professor; they’re both divorced with grown children, and they’ve been set up on a blind date by their mutual friend Dan (Al Madrigal). As soon as they meet, sparks fly. In fact, they hit it off so well that they get married in Las Vegas in the pilot episode, much to the consternation of James’ ex-wife, Claudia (Jamie Lee Curtis), and the confusion of Jeanie’s children, Poppy (Emma Meisel) and Lolo (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio).

Now, in tonight’s episode, “We’ll Never Have Paris,” the duo go on their honeymoon. However, the plans for that are as whirlwind as their wedding, because they’re not actually going anywhere. Nevertheless, James is determined to take his new wife to Paris, or a reasonable approximation of it, so he has his assistant Arvid (Bill O’Neill) lead a beret-clad Jeanie to a “café” (their kitchen), then to an adjoining room, where James is waiting with a scale model of the Eiffel Tower—and Arvid dressed as a mime. Will Jeanie and James’ wedded bliss last, or is the honeymoon over? You’ll have to tune into NBC tonight at 8:30 p.m. ET to find out; it will also stream tomorrow on Peacock.

Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to
be somebody’s person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of
you.

You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have
already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most
durable way anybody has found to do this.

• When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy,
  conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
• You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is
  doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
• The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly
  until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
• You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.

You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own
life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the
relationship easier.

• This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of
  them equally seriously.
• You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a
  rival, and that never entirely goes away.
• It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each
  other, but whose turn it is this year.
• You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.

The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are
drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting
somebody you are not supposed to want.

• Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides,
  meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
• You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things
  more real than public ones.
• The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what
  it would cost either one to say it out loud.
• Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally
  stop hiding.

You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is
immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version
of it.

• Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five
  days, which is precisely the point of it.
• You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats
  decades of something merely comfortable.
• The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an
  enormous life afterwards because of it.
• You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the
  same way.

Who Are the Creatives Behind ‘Newlyweds’?

Jamie Lee Curtis, who also recurs as Claudia, co-created the series with Gail Lerner (Will and Grace), with the latter serving as showrunner; Lerner departed the series last month and was replaced as showrunner by sitcom veteran Bruce Helford (The Conners). It is executive produced by Curtis, Eric Tannenbaum, Kim Tannenbaum, and Scott Schwartz. The series’ pilot was directed by Pamela Fryman (How I Met Your Mother).

“We’ll Never Have Paris,” the third episode of Newlyweds, will premiere on NBC tonight, November 6, at 8:30 p.m., and will stream tomorrow on Peacock. New episodes of Newlyweds air weekly on Fridays at 8:30 pm ET/PT on NBC. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

Newlyweds