Happy Endings - "Baby Steps"

Season 2, Episode 2

The right kind of episode

If “Blax, Snake, Home” was a solid if not perfect return for Happy Endings, then “Baby Steps” represents the type of episode that should have opened the season and the quality that I hope the show strives for going forward. And that’s a good deal of praise for a fairly simplistic episode.

Surprisingly, the plots of tonight’s episode were perhaps sparser than last’s weeks, but it made for a stronger episode overall. By splitting the group off into three pairs – Alex and Penny at the store, Max and Dave working together in the food truck, and Jane and Brad went on down to crazy town – and allowing the pairs to just mostly riff on their situations, it allowed for the maximum amount of laughs a show like this could pull off.

The strongest of the three plots of course belonged to Max and Dave, not only because Adam Pally continues to give the show’s strongest performance, but because this was the storyline with the greatest opportunity for comedic tete-a-tete, an opportunity the show took great advantage of. (Best exchange of the night: “I’ll see you in Hell!” “I’ll see you in Hell, too, but I’ll see you at home first for the Bears game!” “Fine, I’ll get the hummus!” “Fine, get baby carrots too, ’cause I like to dip!”) I’m not going to pretend that this plot had a great deal of resolution, or that it told us anything new about the characters, but it was uproariously entertaining, and that’s all this show seeks to be.

Brad and Jane’s (the second and third best performances, in case you were wondering) storyline comes a close second, as Damon Wayan’s Jr. and Eliza Coupe have developed this weird married-coupled-chemistry that makes for great exchanges between the two. Like most of the story’s that revolve around the pair, tonight one half (in this case, Jane) was the driving force behind the story, while the other went along for the ride and commented on the proceedings.

As a character, Jane has always been a bit of a high-strung, and she’s always this close to becoming too cartoony for the rest of the show, and nothing tends to drive TV women crazier than babies. Luckily, the show was able to couch her weird insistence in being a part of Julia’s Dora’s life with her worries over what she will be like with a mother, and Coupe managed to keep her performance just contained enough to work. (Also, bonus points for making Jane the strong-willed woman who would donate an egg and never look back, but still have enough heart that she would worry about the child once somebody put the idea in her head.)

At that leaves the story involving Penny (fourth!) and Alex (sixth, coming after Dave) and their bottle-episode-esque plot that took place entirely inside Alex’s shop. While the idea of teenage girls using baby onsies as tight t-shirts is a hilarious idea, what followed – with Penny and Alex getting sucked in by the popular girls that never would have given them the time of day when they were in high school, and the shop generally going to pot because of it – was a bit tired, even if the actual performances from Casey Wilson and Elisha Cuthbert were generally funny indeed. And considering I originally thought that the girls were just playing the two of them, it still subverted some of my expectations, and I can’t hate a plot that does that.

In short, this is the kind of episode that convinced me to watch last season, and it’s the kind of episode the show should have aired last week to keep as many viewers on board as possible. (Even though it’s in the night cushiest time-slot, right after Modern Family, the premier saw a loss of 6 million viewers, and who know how many of them were the standard first-time viewers that tend to drop off in the second week.) The show is technically just a “cult hit” now, and ABC’s in a strong enough position (read: it’s not NBC) that it could afford to cancel this show for something that might get bigger numbers (I hope it’s not Work It, knock on wood.) I would like to see the show survive, and it needs to be at its best – like it was tonight – in order to do that.

Quotes, Etc:

My ordering of the best performances, as well as tonight’s riff-heave episode, might make a bit more sense once you read this interviewthe AV Club conducted with Eliza Coupe.

I know that I placed her fourth, but I still really like Wilson’s performance. Maybe it would help if I visualize the strength of each performance amid a spectrum:

Pally Wayans Coupe Wilson                   Knighton                                                          Cuthbert

“What kind of bank won’t let you make a deposit?” “Give it a minute….”

“Why would you deposit money in a sperm bank?”

“The price is right and baby likes a deep tuck.”

“We could go the airport and get some Tom Clancy novels and just get hammered.”

“Max, how many time you I have to tell you, Scotty Pippin is in the financial position to hire a sassy butler.”

“Oh, of course the white lady’s airbag deploys.”

“Which one should I wear? ‘Put me to bed’ or ‘I pooped’?...I just answered my own question.”

“This chest hair is majestic. People could get lost in it.”

“I’ll tell you who else isn’t allowed to just walk in there and be the boss: Tony Danza. And that’s why his talk show was a creative failure.”

“Not perpetrator. Just a friendly stranger with advice about the future.”

“Cause you know if I don’t know what a word means, I automatically think it means testicles.”

“Just a little Shakespeare joke…and speaking of the arts…”

“I dunno, I kind of like Madison. It’s Madison who is a real bitch.”

“And by the way, Jews are actually great tippers, so I don’t know where that came from."