Best Episode of the Season: The Big Bang Theory Season 5

June 18, 2012

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Season Analysis: The Big Bang Theory has always had a weakness for cheap gender and racial gags and overly broad zingers amidst its otherwise keenly observed and performed version of the geek experience; this season, the cheap gags overwhelmed the whole show and produced its worst season thus far.  Until a string of fine episodes to finish off the year, I was worried that TBBT had become completely the worst possible version of itself that its critics think it always is.

“The Launch Acceleration”

Who are the two best characters on The Big Bang Theory?  If you answered anyone besides Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah-Fowler, then you are a fool.  Moreover, obviously, their “romantic” relationship is the most fascinating coupling on the show.  Sheldon professes to be immune to the charms of romantic entanglements and his actions usually make that appear to be the case, but, as a neurobiologist, Amy may have the insight for breaking down that immunity.  Accordingly, she taps into the pleasures of Sheldon’s childhood to insidiously prompt an attachment – utilizing the Super Mario Bros. them as background music, serving spaghetti with little hot dogs cut up along with Strawberry Quik, and playing doctor Star Trek-style.  Sheldon recognizes what she is doing, and he does not like it, except for the fact that he likes it very much.  It is this sort of bizarre understanding of social constructs from socially abnormal individuals that The Big Bang Theory has generally excelled at.  Also in this episode, Leonard and Penny’s relationship – while not at its most dramatic or its most entertaining ever – zips along nicely, and that is the least that we ask of it.

Best Episode of the Season: New Girl Season 1

June 18, 2012

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Season Analysis: Initially, Zooey Deschanel’s character was the only one defined at all on New Girl.  The other regular characters eventually became consistently strong by season’s end, but there is still some work to be done before the storytelling is just as consistently strong.

“Jess & Julia”

I love Zooey Deschanel.  I find her charms irresistible.  I find that iPhone commercial adorable.  But, I recognize that there are some people who are immune to her charms, and I even understand where these people are coming from.  But I do not accept it.  As far as I am concerned, such people are missing out on plenty of joy.  Anyway, it seems that the writers of New Girl also recognized the existence of the Zooey haters, so they decided it was important to confront that force on their show, whose premise and initial promotion were almost entirely reliant on Zooey’s persona.  In the climactic scene of “Jess & Julia,” in which Lizzy Caplan’s Julia points out to – with not-too-subtle disapproval – Zooey’s Jess her “whole thing” of cupcakes and breaking for birds and “bluebirds come and help me dress in the morning,” I thought, “Hey, I like both of these ladies!  Can’t they get along?”  Even though I was disappointed that there ended up a conflict between these two different personality types, I was happy that it prompted Jess (and by implication, Zooey Deschanel, and also by implication, creator Liz Meriwether) to stand up for herself, pointing out, that she does not in fact talk like Teddy Ruxpin and proving that there is indeed some toughness to her despite her intensely sunny worldview.  Seriously, Zooey haters, what is your deal?  She means you no harm and I do not think she means to force her personality onto the rest of the world.

Best Episode of the Season: Raising Hope Season 2

June 18, 2012

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Season Analysis: Raising Hope settled into a groove in Season 2 as it essentially further became My Name is Earl 2.0: the adventures of a quirky working-class (most likely Southwestern) town as created by Greg García, but without the burden of a premise that needs to be attended to every episode.

“Jimmy’s Fake Girlfriend”

One common complaint I encountered about Season 2 of Raising Hope was the lack of interest in Jimmy and Sabrina as (what was supposed to be) the show’s primary romantic coupling.  As the episode “Jimmy’s Fake Girlfriend” demonstrated, the problem was not that Jimmy and Sabrina made a boring couple, it was that they just did not have too many good scenes up until this point.  As the episode culminated in the performance of the story of Jimmy and Sabrina by the Room for Improvment Players (including Burt and Virginia and their hitherto latent but definitely potent improv skills), we, the audience, were won over just as much as Sabrina was.  This episode also provided a template for how to blamelessly prompt a breakup if you are a guy who has feelings for a girl who is with another guy, especially if that guy is a jerk.  The concept of this episode also set up scenes of acting for the sake of acting – a favorite routine of mine – as delivered by Ashley Tisdale, whose expertise in this area was no surprise, being as she is a veteran of the overacting-heavy Disney Channel.

Best Episode of the Season: Up All Night Season 1

June 13, 2012

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Season Analysis: Up All Night established itself as consistently slightly better than mediocre.

“First Birthday”

You know that awkward situation when what is supposed to be a gathering of your friends and family gets out of your control, and you catch strangers becoming just a little too intimate with every nook and cranny of your house?  I don’t know that situation, because I have a big family and I see most members of my family either frequently or at least every so often, and they are generally considerate enough to let me know when someone I don’t know will be joining the festivities.  But I was able to imagine the uncomfortable scenario Will Arnett’s Chris had gotten himself into by agreeing to a joint first birthday party for Amy and neighbor couple George and Terry’s baby due to his inability to say no, and then discovering that George and Terry had invited every last one of their cousins, aunts, and uncles to the Brinkleys’ home.  More important, I was definitely able to relate to Chris and Ava’s desire to end the party when their guests would have preferred to stay put.  I like parties, but I also have things to do, and it is hard to do those things when people are just hanging around.  Chris enthusiastically kicking everyone out was a small-scale victory in his learning how to say no, but it was a significant one, and one that could inspire anyone who has had party guests who have stayed just a little too long.

Best Episode of the Season: Happy Endings Season 2

June 12, 2012

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Season Analysis: After catching my breath from all the laughter, I realized that Happy Endings had suddenly become one of the best comedies on TV.

“Big White Lies”

The natural speed of Happy Endings is hyper-drive.  So, when any episode forces its characters to put together a whole to-do in a short amount of time, then Happy Endings is spinning in its wheelhouse.  For the sake of avoiding going out for tea with Daphne, a slightly off-putting childhood friend (played by Mary Elizabeth Ellis, natch), Penny panics and blurts out ever more elaborate fibs, which eventually involve Alex (who’s supposed to be gay), Brad and Jane (who are supposed to be pregnant), and Dave (who is supposed to have a terminal illness – but refuses to play along), but not really Max (who is happy to play along anyway, and decides that he’s lost his money to Bernie Madoff).  The stakes could not possibly be any lower: when Penny ultimately admits to Daphne that she was just trying to avoid her, Daphne is hardly, if at all, offended.  Those low stakes were exactly the point: these meta-minded friends were all too willing to put on a Three’s Company-esque charade, and could not slow down their hyper imaginations for just a second to realize that there was no real cause for concern.  There was no point to this half hour, except for pure comic brilliance.

Best Episode of the Season: Archer Season 3

June 12, 2012

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Season Analysis: Brought to life by one of the most – if not the most – talented voice casts in the business, Archer is a truly unique animated vision, thanks a great deal to its retro vibe, which seems almost accidental, yet also integral.

“The Limited”

“The Limited” – the wildest, fastest, most hilarious, most joke-filled, most hilarious, and best episode of Archer’s third season – was practically Shakespearean in its comedy.  As in the Bard’s yukfest The Comedy of Errors, if something could make the situation in “The Limited” any funnier, then that something happened: there is an ocelot loose, the train will not slow down because Cheryl’s family owns the train and she wants to break the travel time record, a Nova Scotian separatist movement exists, etc.  Also, just as Will Shakespeare employed doubles and mistaken identities, so did Archer include villains disguised as Canadian Mounties at the same time that the actual Mounties appeared.  But Archer ups the ante even further, as its characters are not plainly the Renaissance stock comedic characters of the clown, the straight man, and the put-upon fool – they are bursting with their own idiosyncratic, slightly absurd, personalities: Sterling Archer is a spy who fancies himself the star of his own spy movie (a silly attitude to have when you are actually a spy) and thus he takes a self-aware view of his own life, in which he makes highly literate, obnoxious comments (“Thanks, Freddy Foreshadowing”) and leaps at the chance to live out a classic action-movie scenario, and pays the price for it (a standoff on top of a speeding train can be quite hellish for all parties involved).  In general, the spies of Archer are all too self-aware for their own good, which means they are self-aware enough to be absolutely fascinating for viewers, and with all that there was to be acutely aware of in “The Limited,” there was almost too much to be fascinated by.

Key & Peele: Season 1 Sketch of the Year

June 11, 2012

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“Obama’s Anger Translator”


Like many classic comedy sketches, Obama’s Anger Translator germinated from a simple seed of an observation: Barack Obama practically never betrays a hint of heated anger, even though his job has given him plenty to get worked up over.  Jordan Peele’s virtuosic Obama impression and Keegan-Michael Key’s talent for portraying the unrepressed id were the perfect combination for illustrating this point.  One could argue that this was a partisan bit tailor-made for Obama supporters, but whenever your opinion of the President or the job he has done, it ought to be admitted that he has faced an intense amount of disagreement, enough that it would be understandable if he started nonsensically spouting out random Michael Jackson lyrics.

Best Episode of the Season: Key & Peele Season 1

June 11, 2012

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Season Analysis: Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, with their astute social and personal insights inspired by their biracial backgrounds, delivered the best new sketch comedy series since Chapelle’s Show.

“Episode 1”
Key & Peele’s first season included an impressive number of sketches that were instant classics or at least very amusing.  However, there was no episode among the first eight that was made up entirely of those sketches that fit those categories; on the other hand, there was also no episode in which it felt like Key and Peele had taken the week off.  Thus, we ended up with a collection of good-to-great episodes, in which none stood out much more than any other, except for the first episode, thanks to its novelty.  Their targets and routines were established quickly and decisively: the roles black/biracial people take on depending on the situation (two black men on their phones toughening up their demeanors as they walk by each other), gender politics (husbands going to great lengths to make sure their wives are out of earshot when they call them bitches), their friendship-based stand-up interstitials, the pop culture parodies for the hell of it (the parody reality cooking show Gideon’s Kitchen), and of course, their take on our first black – but actually, like them, half-black/half-white – president (Obama’s anger translator).  Key and Peele’s comedic voice is practically required listening for members of the American present day.

Best Episode of the Season: The Walking Dead Season 2

June 9, 2012

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Season Analysis: Was that farm that our survivors spent season 2 stuck on some sort of Möbius strip?

“Beside the Dying Fire”

If it wasn’t clear from the series’ beginning, then Season 2 of The Walking Dead made it abundantly clear that a zombie TV show is a very different beast than a zombie movie.  To be able to maintain a reasonable degree of serialization, having a massive zombie attack with the same level of momentum week after week is simply not going to work. So, while The Walking Dead does not have frenetic, claustrophobic horror every single second, it does have decent acting (though spotty characterization) and philosophical explorations of the disintegration of society (though those questions often only scratch the surface).  But when a major zombie horde actually does overrun one of the survivors’ temporary strongholds, it tends to be entertaining.  Hershel’s farm had felt like a town that could not be exited after entering it, so it was a hugely necessary kick in the pants to have it destroyed.  The best moments of “Beside the Dying Fire” – Rick revealing that everyone is infected as well as losing his shit by declaring that this group is “not a democracy”, Andrea getting separated and being saved by the hooded figure with the katana – were satisfying mostly in that they promised new directions for Season 3.  But after a season that chased its own tail, I was happy to have exciting previews.

Portlandia: Season 2 Sketch of the Year

June 7, 2012

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“Sanitation Twins”


Marcus and Madeleine Harris – the Sanitation Twins! – are here to tell you, Portland, about all the new and exciting recycling bins!  Like many an attempt to ease and simplify, this effort becomes comically complicated, as seemingly everything and anything (broken umbrellas, lotion, fingernails, eggshells, etc.) can be recycled, a bewildering array of colors (periwinkle, fuchsia, rose, canary, chartreuse, cobalt) are required for each particular recycled group, and each individual element of a whole (coffee cup, sleeve, stir stick, and lid – and lids with lipstick are treated differently than lipstick-less lids) must be separated.  The humor of “Sanitation Twins” does not let up for a second, as it is not just about the bizarre complications that can arise from good intentions.  Fred and Carrie have created thoroughly well-thought out characters in Marcus and Madeleine, as demonstrated by their back-and-forth banter when they go off-script – lack of timing issues such as when they fail to say “We’re twins!” in unison, yeller vs. yellow, Marcus holding onto some old tapes that Madeleine is trying to force him to get rid of, and the discussion about whether or not the fingernails could be Einstein’s.  The ending punctuates another joke to the whole affair, sparking the question of, “Isn’t this all so pointless?”, as the recyclables can only become clean air, fresh water, or good vibes, while the other NINETY-SEVEN percent is dumped into the ocean.

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