Wednesday, October 26, 2011
YOU LOOK LIKE A FINGER AFTER A TEN-HOUR BATH: On the occasion of a fine episode of Happy Endings (and here is my apology to Happy Endings for quitting after five minutes last season; it's always a pleasant surprise when writers learn to write for their characters and their actors), I had a thought. I am wondering whether Penny and Max's mother-and-baby-in-Bjorn costume was the most subtly disturbing costume on television since Sam Weir donned the Viking head for McKinley. They both seem to fall right in the middle of the real-world uncanny valley.
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So this is something I ought to be watching? My antipathy toward Elisha Cuthbert and all things Wayans convinced me not to watch (along with generally negative reviews at the start), but I generally like Casey Wilson and Eliza Coupe, and a lot of folks whose views I trust seem to have very much come around on this. If I'm going to try, where should I start?
ReplyDeleteI love this show. Wayans is fantastic and different from his family. Cuthbert is a minor player now. Eliza Coupe is great. Start watching sometime last year - mid-season got good.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with KR. I watched a marathon on ABC Family before the beginning of the season and am totally hooked now. (I too had stayed away because of Cuthbert.) Wayans is super charming, Wilson and Coupe are wonderful and you can mostly ignore Cuthbert.
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ReplyDeleteEliza Cuthbert is the weak link in a lot of the early episodes and, frankly, Zachary Knighton is right there with her. Luckily enough, ABC aired the first season viciously out of order and I got to see the promise the show exhibited after the first couple of shaky episodes.
<span>The initial logline for the series read "An altar-bound couple break up on their wedding day, forcing their friends to choose which side to take after the split." As soon as they abandoned that forced conceit (which is probably one of the main reasons it got on the air in the first place), Happy Endings started improving by leaps and bounds. </span>Wayans was been pretty stellar, and I'd even go so far as to say that Cuthbert can pull a good deal more than her weight when the writers find a good thread for her. It's a pleasant little show that I was surprised to find myself nearly as invested in as some bigger name comedies.
I love Eliza Coupe, and Damon Wayans is, as others have said, excellent (he was also the best thing about the pilot of New Girl -- I still like that show without him, but he was the standout). I also like the Max character. The writers have figured out the right way to use Cuthbert, which is to make her the butt of jokes. She doesn't have the comedy chops of four out of the five others (her ex-fiancee also is pretty bad), so they make jokes about how unfunny she is when she tries to be funny. It's effective and allows the cast to show affection for her without making them pretend that she's one of them.
ReplyDeleteOr they dress Cuthbert up like Marilyn Monroe and have her pole dance. That also works.
ReplyDeleteI think the success of this show can be summed up with one word: "Ah-MAHZ-ing."
ReplyDeletePenny's repitition of this word is the most annoying thing, and I'd bet a dime to a dozen donuts that it tested as such, but it's also super-representative of her character: She wants the world to jump on the AhMAZing bandwagon with her, and won't rest until it happen. What starts out as an annoying affectation eventually becomes one of those things that, well, what can you do, she's a close friend, and it's kind of cute anyway, right?
The same kind of thing happens all over these flawed but likable characters as they've been allowed to evolve. It totally makes the show worth watching.
That, and moments like "You aren't close enough for any of us to high-five you."
I haven't seen Happy Endings, but is this meant to be a spoof of Rachel Zoe's ah-MAHZ-ing thing or is it a new thing?
ReplyDeleteThe episode that got me hooked was the one where Penny dates a hipster, and tries to keep up with him- I promise you, the execution was way better than it sounds. I think once you know the general plot outline that Dan Suitor wrote, you can kind of hop around (or at least I did, since the immediate aftermath of the "left at the altar" stuff was kind of tired).
ReplyDeleteI got your back:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.hulu.com/watch/238677/happy-endings-maxs-school-of-hipster
Really fun show. The 90 minutes of Happy Endings and Revenge might be one of the best stretches in primetime.
<span>REVENGE! Oh man, agreed! That show is awesome.</span>
ReplyDeleteWho? Don't. I watch so much stuff. Don't judge me. <span> </span>
ReplyDeleteOK, I just watched the season premiere, and I'm pretty well sold, especially given how soft Wednesday is on networks. (I've not sampled Revenge, despite a lot of people telling me I should, and I'm still of two minds on American Horror Story.)
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