New year, same old Tuesday comedy clusterfuck. Well, now with added Cougar Town! So let's dig right into the ridiculously abundant comedy choices our friend television gave us tonight.
Ben and Kate started off the year a little below the high standards it set for itself in the fall, having one of those typical "off" episodes that tries to cram too much into one half-hour. The only plot that felt completely satisfying was the BJ sub-plot, which had her meet her mother and successfully add another comic layer to her already hilarious character. I always like when we meet a characters' parents for the first time and it all feels so natural that it actually seems like that character was shaped by whatever guest actor is dropping in to play their parent and not a room of writers, and Ben & Kate achieved that with the BJ plotline. The rest of the episode was...fine, and had some really great moments - particularly from Dakota Johnson, who is already nearing all-star levels. But the show was juggling so much - Ben's failed business prospects! Kate's insecurities as a single mother! Being happy with yourself! - that it never quite stuck the landing on any of it. All of these themes are viable directions for the characters and would've been better off in separate episodes, rather than being crammed into one. Still, an episode that ended with a fake newscast by Ben and BJ which included the line "the only safe squirrel is a dead squirrel" can't be all that bad.
New Girl kicked off 2013 in pretty strong fashion, though. "Cabin" was a solid showing of everything the show does well - excellent character moments, a handful of top-notch Nick Miller speeches, and subtlety impressive characterization. Really, the entire episode could've just been the two couples in the cabin getting drunk and acting ridiculous, and it would've been a quality half-hour of television. But, as has become typical with New Girl, the show yearns for something more, so "Cabin" was both hilarious and a clear set-up for upcoming character movement. The show in particular seems to be building towards some kind of revelation for Nick, trying to figure out what it is he truly wants. Clearly, what he wanted wasn't Angie, someone completely out of his comfort zone who he thought "pushed him forward" but really just confused both of them. Having the episode end with Nick, freshly dumped by Angie, not quite processing his break-up was an interesting choice, and one that sets up a lot of interesting territory for the next few episodes. But I would be lying if I said my favorite part of the episode wasn't B-plot - a delightfully cringe-worthy story about Schmidt demonstrating some hardcore reverse racism and trying to get Winston to "embrace his culture". It's not really a sweeping statement to say that the scene where Schmidt and Winston invite a man into their car and the three of them proceed to think they're robbing each other is the funniest TV scene of 2013 so far, but I feel like it might hold that title for a while.
Happy Endings had two offerings this week, one on Sunday and another one tonight. Why ABC is doing this is...not really as exciting as it seems, they just needed something to fill the hole 666 Park Avenue left and they happened to have unscheduled episodes of Happy Endings/Apartment 23. Anyway, Sunday's episode was Happy Endings at its playful best, throwing out two comfortingly wacky plotlines and watching its actors sell the hell out of them. I thought tonight's episode, though, was the show's weakest in quite a while. The fact that I still laughed pretty much through-out the entire thing goes to show just how consistently satisfying the show has been lately, but I thought the plots were all pretty dull and just never really came together. I was surprised, in particular, with how straight the show played the pretty generic pop star plot. Typically, Happy Endings will take a stock sitcom storyline and tweak it to fit their own outlandish style - like how Sunday's episode looked like it was going to have a groan-worthy "characters break something while their friend is away and try to fix it" plot, until said characters end up killing their friends' racist parrot in the process. But tonight's plotlines - especially the pop star one - were pretty much straight out of Sitcoms 101. The exception would probably be Max's plotline, which did a typically great job of subverting a lot of gay stereotypes to tell a weirdly meaningful and simultaneously bizarre story about Max's sexuality. The other two had plenty of laughs, but ultimately lacked that spark that makes for a truly great Happy Endings.
Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 has been seriously fucked over by ABC's weird scheduling decisions. After Sunday's episode put June in a new job and had Mark almost ready to admit his feelings for her, tonight's episode - a holdover from Season 1 - hit the reset button and put her back in the coffee shop while Mark just started to realize he had any feelings for June. Despite all that, both of this week's episodes of the show were really good, demonstrating the show's impressive ability to put together an incredibly ridiculously and cartoonish half-hour and still somehow make us care about the characters in them. In fact, if you take tonight's episode and stack it up against Sunday's (produced much later) episode, you can see how much the characters have grown over the course of the show's run - particularly June, who's gone from a Chuckie Finster "I don't know if that's such a good ideaaaa, Chloe" type to someone who can be just as cunning as Chloe herself, in her own way. I mean, tonight's episode had her desperately trying to win the love and respect of her neighbors, while Sunday's episode had her stabbing her nemesis at work. That's some excellent character work. Maybe one day we'll get to see in the order it was supposed to happen.
I don't even really have anything to say about The Mindy Project anymore, other than the usual "it should be so much better" type of stuff that everyone on the internet is already saying. At this point, it just feels like the show is about absolutely nothing - the plots are all meaningless, just about every character other than Mindy, Danny, and maybe Morgan is totally disposable, and the show doesn't even really have a central focus other than "Mindy's a mess" anymore. Tonight's episode could have been a nice story about Mindy's relationship with her brother, and it could've provided us with some nice-needed characterization for the show's problematic lead character. Instead, it...ended with a broad and not all that funny rap number where Mindy had to stand in for her brother's back-up singer and sing dirty lines to him, and...that was it. The show has just added two more great comedy writers to its staff - 30 Rock alumni Jack Burditt and Tracey Wingfield. Let's hope they can get this show on track. I mean, no one else could, but...
Oh, and I also watched the cable premiere of Cougar Town. I've only sporadically watched the show, but I did watch the premiere and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's one of those shows on my backlog to catch up with, and I'm hoping to do so as soon as possible. I'm planning on writing something about what the show's move to cable could potentially mean for the broadcast sitcom soon, so I'll talk about it a little more in-depth there, if it happens!
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