Maggie and Andrew Prentice are entering their golden years and planning on a life of retirement leisure in the south of France when their estranged son, Graham and his wife perish in an auto accident leaving behind their three children(a girl and two boys) whom Maggie and Andrew barely know and now must care for. The series deals with how the five of them adjust to each other under exceptionally trying circumstances (They don't initially like each other very much). Believe it or not, this is a comedy! And a funny one it is despite the morbid subject matter.Penelope Keith creates a memorable character in Maggie Prentice, an abrasive, easily irritated and self-involved woman who has the chance to make up for the years of neglect of her own son by caring for his three children. William Gaunt is also very good as the more easygoing of the two grandparents (with a tendency to drink too much) who must also make some extreme sacrifices to do the right thing by his grandchildren.Wisely, this series has kept the more treacly moments to a minimum and so when they come they are all the more powerful as they indicate, fairly realistically, that grandparents and grandchildren are beginning to care for each other despite the conflicts that rage in the household daily. Some of the best moments: Andrew discovers that his grandson, Phillip, believes he is responsible for his parents' death and helps him cope; Georgia, the teen-aged daughter who is difficult at best, has stopped eating believing that no one likes her and it is up to Maggie to reassure her; and the last moments of the last episode of the series (shame on BBC for canceling it!) when Maggie receives a Mother's Day card from Phillip.Bottom line: highly recommended

My first impressions on seeing this series was: "Yes, Penelope Keith is still brilliant, but this series isn't really funny." I felt the children were too antagonistic - it felt real, but not funny. But, seeing that La Keith was on great form, I kept watching and grew to love the series. The children grew as actors, and you could, to purloin a phrase, "feel their pain". Pain is not something you normally associate with sitcoms, but here it was. Now I think the series should be considered a groundbreaking show: the way the pain, sorrow and frustration the children felt was dealt with intelligently and moving. And I reiterate what the others have stated: THIS SERIES SHOULD BE RELEASED ON DVD!

I remember viewing this show on a local PBS station. While I do have a taste for British comedy, the whole dramatic premise just kills it. It could be have been brilliant but the whole idea is flawed: why should we care about three whiny know-it-all brats being taken care of their until-now-unknown grandparents? It's not a show as much as it's being at the funeral of a stranger: you don't know where you fit in, but you rather just be somewhere else. That's how I felt, and felt better when I turned the channel.

After a brilliant career in exaggerated comedy roles such as Margot Leadbetter and Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, Penelope Keith stretched her acting talents to play a realistic woman in a sitcom with a grimly realistic premise: 'Next of Kin', which ran on BBC1 from May 1995 to February 1997. She was partnered by the equally talented William Gaunt: like Ms Keith, he is a performer who is best known for comedy roles yet is equally adept at drama. 'Next of Kin' featured a premise which American TV programmers would probably have rejected as too morbid.Maggie and Andrew Prentice are nearing sixty. They have one son, Graham, whom they've not seen in years. Graham developed into a snob and married a woman with radical politics who despised Maggie and Andrew. Consequently, Maggie and Andrew have been completely estranged from their son for more than twenty years. Comfortably middle-class but not wealthy, they're now looking forward to a retirement scheme that involves travel and fine dining.Suddenly a constable arrives to inform the Prentices that their son and his wife have been killed in a road accident. Maggie and Andrew are now the legal guardians of their three grandchildren: young teen Georgia, Graham Jnr (on the brink of teendom) and little Jake (just starting school). These children are total strangers to Maggie and Andrew, who consider the merits of putting the children into an orphan asylum. Ultimately, they choose to take the children into their home ... realising that their retirement will be put off indefinitely.The grandchildren have been raised in the mould of their annoying parents. Georgia is a politically-correct little snot, who fancies herself morally superior to everyone who fails to share her inconvenient political views. Georgia favours the socialist National Health Service over privatised physicians ... but then, when she decides to get braces on her teeth, she comes up with a pretentious reason for going to a private orthodontist instead of the NHS clinic ... meaning that Maggie and Andrew will get lumbered with the cost of the braces. Georgia's brother Graham, meanwhile, is on the brink of juvenile delinquency. Youngster Jake is the most annoying character in this series: he tends to be a little too twee, a little too babyish.'Next of Kin' features extremely realistic situations. When Andrew learns that Graham is bunking off school, he gives him the usual lecture: you've got to apply yourself and get good marks so you can get into a good college and then get a good job. To which Graham replies, very reasonably: 'My dad did all that, and he got killed anyway.'As happens often in long-running British TV programmes (but very seldom in American ones), the characters in 'Next of Kin' changed and developed over the course of the show's run. The three grandchildren were initially hostile to Maggie and Andrew, but gradually the five of them developed into a real family. Georgia began as a self-righteous little bitch: early on in the relationship, she writes false entries in her diary and then hides it in her room, knowing that the snooping Maggie will find it and read it. (Plausibly, the grandparents have their own faults here.) And yet Georgia gradually modified her extremist personality. In one episode, the Prentices take their grandchildren to the zoo. Georgia spots a tiger, and immediately she belabours the zoo keeper with a lecture about how the tiger should roam free in the wild. The zoo keeper sets her straight, explaining that this particular tiger is old and ill and can't survive in the wild, and anyway his original habitat has now been changed irrevocably by human development. Georgia is too bloody-minded to admit that she was wrong, but you can see that she's rethinking her views...A subplot in 'Next of Kin' depicted the relationship between sexy Liz (Tracie Bennett), Maggie's daily cleaner, and muscular young builder Tom (Mark Powley), who has been engaged by Andrew to build an extension on the house following the arrival of the three grandchildren. The Liz-Tom subplot was less interesting than the growing relationship between the Prentices and their grandchildren, and these two characters were dropped after the extension was finished.Remarkably, in spite of its morbid premise, 'Next of Kin' managed to be extremely funny whilst depicting extremely realistic situations. Most enjoyably, there was a total absence of those supposedly heart-warming 'Awwww' moments which render so many Yank TV comedies utterly unwatchable. No talking animals or hand-puppet aliens in this wonderful sitcom ... but some splendid acting and plenty of laughs. I'll rate 'Next of Kin' 9 points out of 10.