New TV show ‘Ordinary Joe’ puts Syracuse University in a pivotal role

Syracuse University plays a pivotal role in the new NBC television series “Ordinary Joe.”

James Wolk (”Mad Men,” “Watchmen”) stars as Joe Kimbreau, a music major from New York who’s at a crossroads on his graduation day at SU in 2011. The pilot episode introduces three key people, who are also graduating from Syracuse: His best friend Eric (Charlie Barnett), his sort-of girlfriend Jenny (Elizabeth Lail), and a potential new flame named Amy (Natalie Martinez).

“They call graduation a commencement because it’s not the end, but the beginning of something new in your life,” Joe says.

Wearing an orange cap and gown, he soon realizes he has three clear paths: Go to dinner with his family, who is encouraging him to become a police officer like his father who was killed in New York City on Sept. 11; go to the beach with Jenny, who wants to “talk” about their future; or pursue Amy, a dreamer who makes him feel like he could become the next Billy Joel.

“You ever get that feeling that one choice could change your whole life?” Joe asks.

The episode then picks up 10 years later, exploring three different lives Joe is leading in 2021. In one, he’s a rock star kissing Amy backstage at a sold-out concert while the crowd cheers his name. In the second, he’s married to Jenny, has a special needs son and is a nurse working the night shift at a hospital. In the third, he joins the NYPD and is single, wondering “what if?” with his friend Eric.

The TV show then explores each path, showing how that one decision at Syracuse changes everything. In the pilot, for example, he’s a cop who foils an assassination attempt and escorts the suspect to the hospital — or he’s in the ER treating the congressman that he didn’t save because he wasn’t there to stop the shooter.

Showrunners Garrett Lerner and Russel Friend have no connection to Syracuse, but adapted the pilot script by filmmaker Matt Reeves (”The Batman,” “Cloverfield,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”) to include the SU references. The story was originally set in California, but they choose to move the location to New York to make it more of a personal story.

“I grew up on Oyster Bay, Long Island. So it was Billy Joel central,” Friend told Collider. “We were just thinking, it might be cool to move it. Let’s set it in New York and you could maybe grow up in Queens. I have family who live in Flushing and it just felt like kind of the perfect location for this family whose dad was a cop. It just felt like the perfect location for him to grow up. And that’s where he met Eric and they were best friends. And then, from there it sort of just grew into everything else — sending them to Syracuse came out of that.”

Of course, the Syracuse University details are not entirely accurate as the pilot was shot in Chicago and other episodes are mainly filmed in Atlanta. The graduation gowns are orange (SU’s gowns are actually blue), the quad is clearly not in Syracuse, and the commencement ceremony takes place in an outdoor stadium — not the Carrier Dome.

Still, a Billy Joel fan at Syracuse is 100% plausible. The “Piano Man” singer spoke at SU’s commencement in 2006 and has performed a record seven shows at the Carrier Dome. Plus, more than a third of undergraduates come from New York state.

Other TV shows that have featured fictional Syracuse alumni include “New Girl” (Max Greenfield, Jake Johnson and Lamorne Morris as Schmidt, Nick Miller and Winston Bishop); “Rules of Engagement” (Patrick Warburton as Jeff Bingham); “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” (Terry Crews as Terry Jeffords); and “Men of a Certain Age” (Ray Romano, Scott Bakula and Andre Braugher as Joe Tranelli, Terry Elliott and Owen Thoreau Jr.).

“Ordinary Joe” premiered Sept. 20 on NBC, and has maintained a small but steady audience of more than 2 million viewers each week. It’s got a 64% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.7 out of 10 rating on IMDb, plus has drawn comparisons to “Sliding Doors” — the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie that explores two parallel lives hinging on whether or not she catches a train — and the acclaimed drama “This Is Us,” which follows a family at different times in their lives.

“We were looking to develop something, read (Reeves’ script) and thought like, wow, this feels like a perfect NBC show, this feels like a ‘This Is Us’ successor, such a beautiful little piece,” Lerner told Collider. “And the network, they saw our vision and bought it and wondered the same thing, like where does it go as a series? We just had confidence in these characters, in these paths, in these stories that were going forward and we’d just been running with it ever since... so it’s going some pretty exciting places.”

“Ordinary Joe” airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on NBC; episode 8 will air Nov. 15. All episodes, including the series premiere, can be streamed on Peacock and Hulu.