Instant Family

When Pete and Ellie decide to start a family, they stumble into the world of foster care adoption. They hope to take in one small child but when they meet three siblings, including a rebellious 15 year old girl, they find themselves speeding from zero to three kids overnight.

Instant Family won over general audiences far more decisively than it did professional critics, who were split between finding it a warm, functional family comedy and dismissing it as too formulaic to do justice to the real complexities of foster care adoption. The gap between its enthusiastic audience reception and middling critical average is itself the story here.