Happy Endings - "The Shrink, The Dare, Her Date, and Her Brother"

Season 2, Episode 10

About a month and a half ago, a friend of mine was asking me questions about the difficulties facing television (specifically comedies) in the light of every increasing ad breaks and the related decreasing of shows’ actual running times. It was a question that I sort of left unanswered for a while, both because I was in the midst of finals, and because there wasn’t anything substantial to my response that I deemed worth of writing a blog post over it. However, this latest episode of Happy Endings – a show that illustrates how comedies can work with only the room of 20 minutes and change to tell a story – seems to poised to raise that question once again, as it sought about to upend its regular formula for something more traditional, and frankly a little off-putting.

While the increase in the number and running time of commercial breaks has been a boon to the drama series, in that they been forced to streamline their episodes and avoid spending time on useless tangents, the same can’t be said for comedies. In comedy, the tangential is usually the comedic, and limiting the runtime of comedies forces them to choose between storytelling and jokes. Some comedies (like How I Met Your Mother) end up choosing story first, but most comedies end up choosing jokes, and in order to compensate on the story side of things, they choose to go with simple and familiar story beats, so that they don’t have to spend the screen time set up the stories because, well, the audience already knows them well enough. (This statement best applies to just about anything Chuck Lorre has ever made.)

My main line of thought since I’ve started doing these reviews is that Happy Endings make for a good comedy series for pretty much one reason above all else: not that it eschews complex storylines in favor of the ability to cram as many gags as possible within an episode, but that it frankly eschews any story beats whatsoever. Instead, we get initial setup of a story, and the show lets the jokes proceed, escalate, and build on top of one another until the episode reached what seems to be a natural end of things. This is a hard move to pull, because you have to keep throwing jokes at the audience to make up for the lack of storyline, but you also have to make sure that the jokes proceed in a logical manner. Get to crazy with your jokes and you just end up being like Family Guy, and nobody wants that.

This set up also tends to give the show a bit of leeway when it comes to setup/stories that it tells. The show can use a more tired setup and rejuvenate it if the jokes are wild and different enough that the story seems to take on a different angle than past iterations. This holds for the Max/Jane storyline. Fighting over a items of clothing? That’s definitely been done before. But from there, the show took it on a different bent not by having them fight passively aggressively over the sweater directly, but instead having a ridiculous bet where they tried to shame each other through the outrageous outfits they chose for each other. From there is got even more ridiculous, as their personalities took the bet to the extreme.

By comparison, the Alex/Brad storyline is one that never seemed to rise above its initial premise. Just about every comedy centered on a group of friends has done an episode where two of the friends apparently don’t know each other that well, and seek to correct that. For starters, I have a hard time believe that as close as this group seems to be, that Alex and Brad would be that uncomfortable around each other. The show was smart to play up the “they only know each other as in-laws angle”, but I’ve seen them interact enough times in the past that I find it hard to believe that their relationship isn’t a little bit stronger than what was presented here. From there, things only got worse, with a whole lot of jokes about "out calls", though it did perk up a bit around the end. Though to talk about that, we’re going to have to back up a bit.

So with all this success that the show has with telling purposely half-formed stories, what are we to make of the closing minutes of the episode, which set up what seems to be a will-they-or-won’t-they storyline for Dave and Penny. Happy Endings started out as a romantic comedy of sorts, what with the dissolution of Alex and Dave’s marriage right there at the altar, and as I’ve written before, I think the show’s stronger for having dropped that line of thinking. So for them to now bring up another rom com sort of staple with Alex and Penny seems not only out of left field, but also an ill-advised return to a tone that didn’t work previously.

But perhaps not. The episode opened with what seemed at the time to be a meta sort of gag where the group poo-poos romantic comedies, and thus the show’s original premise. Yet, when you take that in context with the resolution of the Alex/Brad storyline, where they enjoy rom coms (and the show implicitly makes fun of them so more), and the fact that the end of the Dave/Penny storyline mirror those of the in-show film “That’s the Way It’s Gotta Be”, it appears that the show is serious about pulling off this plotline, and that it believes that it can do so without resorting to rom com phoniness. I hope that’s the case, because I would hate for the show to make the mistake of breaking out of the mold that works by reaching for some higher, and then just end up going through the motions of a stale old story.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

I will say this for the Dave/Penny pairing: Casey Wilson does not fit the look of the traditional leading lady (remember the rumor that she got fired from SNL due to her figure/weight?), so for the show to make her the first female character to get a serious romantic storyline seems positively progressive. Good on you, show. 

That was Ken Marino as Dave's shrink, giving an appropriately smarmy performance. I hope the show keeps bringing in such skilled comedic actors, because it worked like gangbusters here.

“How many times has your grandma died? Because you said the same thing about half a sandwich.”

“Seriously, I get stuck with the check again? What is the point of having white friends?”

“The war? Which war?” “The war on drugs, and we won.”

“He touched me here, and here. I wanted him to touch me here, but he wouldn’t. Why wouldn’t he?”

“No phones sound like that.” “Shush babe, I’m on the phone.”

“Are hip-hop and rap the same thing?” “YES.”

“‘Richard Rickman’ is the name of a respected therapist. ‘Rick Rickman’ will sell you a used Grand Cherokee.”

“My personal best was a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker, and yes, they were all in one tub.”

“And it should be easy to fool her, because I’m super easy to fool, and we’re sisters.” “I’m beginning to think that I dodge a bullet there.”

“Seriously, am I the only one who thinks Rick Rickman is a ridiculous name?” “We’ll, it s a lot better than Dick Dickman.” “No, you can’t change the last name….forget it. I dodged a bullet there.”

“People don’t really come to my store between 5 and 7:30, and sometimes between 10 and 5.”

“Jane, I thought we agreed to say ‘in our pants’. The fire is in our pants.”

“And why are you putting air quotes around ‘platonic’, and ‘leaving’, and ‘man’?”