Cougar Town: "Walls"

Season 2, Episode 15

A post-hiatus airing hinders a pre-hiatus episode

Any review of “Walls” is going to be skewed; though it is airing as the first episode back after about six weeks off the air, it was originally intended to be the episode to air before the hiatus, though it was bumped due to the airing of the Tucson Memorial back in February. So while it was a welcome return for the show last night, and despite the high quality of the episode, there exists a disconnect between when this episode was meant to air and when it actually aired.

Take, for instance, the Travis plot that kicked off tonight. As Bill Lawrence stated in his interview with Alan Sepinwall, this is the beginning of a turning point in Travis’s character tonight, and it obviously starts with his intended proposal to Kirsten. (Who’s clearly not going to be around much longer. Man, I’m gonna miss her.) Yet as excited as I am to see how this develops, the tension the “cliffhanger” ending (I’m pretty sure CT is incapable of giving us a true cliffhanger, but I don’t have a better word to describe the setup present in the closing minutes) is supposed to generate is negated by the fact that we will probably see how this turns out tomorrow, or at the very latest, next week. It unfortunately lessens the impact of what I’m sure would have been a perfect mix for a frustrating/intriguing hanging thread to send us off into hiatus.

I get a similar feeling of disconnect when approaching he Jules side of that plotline. As I (may have) said before, Jules’s characterization has increasingly become more and more grating this season – with her actions in the January/February episode being particularly annoying –  and tonight’s episode was meant to be a remedy to that. (As the Lawerence interview also lets us know, this wasn’t so much by design as the writers attempting to answer a recent criticism that many of the shows “professional fans”[i.e. TV critics] were making. ) Yet even as I was aware that this was what they were trying to do, it’s didn’t feel as satisfying for me due to the hiatus. Since I haven’t been subject to the more grating side of Jules for several weeks now (even if I did recently rush through the first season DVD in order to quell my CT fix), this change failed to make the impact it could have coming off a fresh bout of Jules madness.

Surprisingly, the Penny Can (PEEEEENNNNNNNY CAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!) subplot actually did work well off of the hiatus, though not in the way that I imagine it was meant to. “Penny Can” has been the breakout running joke of the series, and I’m pretty sure that the full-on inclusion of it in this episode was meant to serve as a grace note for the show to go out on, something that would stick with the viewers and make sure they would return come April. Instead, it works just as well – perhaps even better – as a sort of welcome back, a return of just one of the many things we love about this series. Because seriously, few things have caused me this much joy during this television season as seeing an all out Penny Can contest at a bar.

The one subplot that seemed to be immune to this “Post-Hiatus Syndrome” was the Grayson/Andy subplot, for good reason. Though I enjoyed this subplot – the Grayson/Andy pairing is always one of my favorites – it feels like we’ve been down this road too many times before, with Grayson not believing (in) Andy, and he eventually coming around, even if this particular plot was meant to reflect how Grayson sees/interacts with the Cul-de-Sac Crew as a whole. Frankly anything after the subplot where the two hashed out Andy’s high school insecurities is just going to feel a bit slight at this point.

Agree or disagree?

Additional Thoughts:

This week in title cards: We’re back. (Hi, Dance fans…please be there.)

“Why is she stirring the sauce outside?”

“He can’t stop. He was cooked in her baby oven.”

“Hot damn this is good bread. Oh, we’re being sad now?”

Bobby Cobb’s #1 Rule of Parenting: Don’t get involved.

“STACHE ATTACK!”

“This may be harder than The Case of the Stinky Fridge.”

“Man, my name has got a lot of ‘B’s’ in it.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. The breasts she was pressing against my back were way too loud.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing.” “No one ever does.”

“What do you think this guy eats for breakfast? Goat?”