Season 2, Episode 18
Part of the what makes Happy Endings work so often is that it is able to introduce what seems like a tired sitcom plot, and manages to invert it or put it's own twist on the proceedings. (It's fitting then that the show's worst episodes are those that don't twist those premises enough.) One-liners are great, and part of the reason the show is so funny is because it manages to pack so many jokes into an episode, but jokes alone don't always make for great comedy, and that's why I find the show's distortion of cliches so important to it's success. So then what are we to make of an episode that purposefully uses tropes to tell it's story, and is actually successful in the process?
The “long wait for a table” isn't just a television cliché, it's a cliché of life. It's the stuff that made up some of the worst stand-up comedy of the 90s, and it was such a cliché that Seinfeld ended up doing an entire episode around it. That was an episode that was more defined by the fact that it was a expertly-paced bottle episode, but it still relied on the show's knack for making episodes about “nothing” by satirizing the everyday nature of so many “high-concept” sitcoms before it.
Happy Endings has no claims to such high-minded ideals, and that's what would make its decision to have an episode based solely around this idea seem like such a risky move. And yet it worked for some fairly simple reasons.
For starters, the episode relied on that old show standby of packing as many lines as possible into the episode. Remember what I said about how jokes alone can't make for a great episode? Well, it still helps. A lot. Even show's worst episodes aren't that hard to enjoy because you can distract yourself from the weak story by laughing at all of the jokes. (Well, except for the pilot and the first few episodes after. But that was the show being plagued much larger problems that have since been solved.) So that conversation that opened the episode about which restaurant they would eat at? Fantastic? The similar conversation at the restaurant? Even better.
But beyond that – and there would have to be a beyond for me to enjoy the episode as much as I did – this episode also gave a great background for the characters. “Character-based” isn't a word I would usually use to describe Happy Endings, and I don't think that it's a tone that the show should aim for all the time, but in this case it worked out quite well. We got another flashback into Jane and Brad's relationship, which as one of my favorite TV marriages currently on air, is something that I enjoyed immensely. We also got to see Dave face the consequences of his post-wedding spiral, Alex learn to become more confident, and Penny owns up to her aggressive singlehood. (Max is mostly just concerned with getting food, but that's enjoyable in it's own right.)
What's important to take away is that Happy Endings now has enough episodes under it's belt that it's managed to make the entire group dynamic work to it's advantage. (And opposed to the duo and trio dynamics that it was implementing previously.) And continuing with the trend of this season, which saw episodes continuously cut down on the busy nature of past episodes by joining the characters into fewer and fewer plotlines, we finally got an episode where the entire group was involved with the A-plot, and said plot didn't spin off into some disparate parts. This is the making of an incredibly confident comedy series, and I can't wait to see what Happy Endings does now that it's here.
Quotes and Other Thoughts:
“You can't just go around Daylight Saving Times-ing people.”
“Hey, if Degrassi's on the field, play ball, right?”
Happy Endings has no claims to such high-minded ideals, and that's what would make its decision to have an episode based solely around this idea seem like such a risky move. And yet it worked for some fairly simple reasons.
For starters, the episode relied on that old show standby of packing as many lines as possible into the episode. Remember what I said about how jokes alone can't make for a great episode? Well, it still helps. A lot. Even show's worst episodes aren't that hard to enjoy because you can distract yourself from the weak story by laughing at all of the jokes. (Well, except for the pilot and the first few episodes after. But that was the show being plagued much larger problems that have since been solved.) So that conversation that opened the episode about which restaurant they would eat at? Fantastic? The similar conversation at the restaurant? Even better.
But beyond that – and there would have to be a beyond for me to enjoy the episode as much as I did – this episode also gave a great background for the characters. “Character-based” isn't a word I would usually use to describe Happy Endings, and I don't think that it's a tone that the show should aim for all the time, but in this case it worked out quite well. We got another flashback into Jane and Brad's relationship, which as one of my favorite TV marriages currently on air, is something that I enjoyed immensely. We also got to see Dave face the consequences of his post-wedding spiral, Alex learn to become more confident, and Penny owns up to her aggressive singlehood. (Max is mostly just concerned with getting food, but that's enjoyable in it's own right.)
What's important to take away is that Happy Endings now has enough episodes under it's belt that it's managed to make the entire group dynamic work to it's advantage. (And opposed to the duo and trio dynamics that it was implementing previously.) And continuing with the trend of this season, which saw episodes continuously cut down on the busy nature of past episodes by joining the characters into fewer and fewer plotlines, we finally got an episode where the entire group was involved with the A-plot, and said plot didn't spin off into some disparate parts. This is the making of an incredibly confident comedy series, and I can't wait to see what Happy Endings does now that it's here.
Quotes and Other Thoughts:
“You can't just go around Daylight Saving Times-ing people.”
“Hey, if Degrassi's on the field, play ball, right?”
“Wait, Darth Vader was a Nazi?”
“The curse of Max's love handles strikes again.”
“Would that make her Mary Tyler Moore Tyler Moore Moore Moore?”
“As they say in Spanish...Jane and I get caught having sex in the bathroom.”
“Now I'm waiting tables to save money for stripping lessons to save money for junior college.”
“Instead of ordering tacos, you ordered 'meat, cheese, and lettuce in one of those crunchy half-moon envelope things'.”
“She was dating a poet who told her that prom was just a holiday invented by the tuxedo company.”
“He wasn't a poet, he was a bard!”
“We have to break out of the box, talk about restaurants that don't exist. For example: where does Gollum eat?”
“Now that I've got some food in me, crawling through the air vents seems like a bad idea. And knocking out the bus boys is just mean.”
“I'm Dave.”
“We have to break out of the box, talk about restaurants that don't exist. For example: where does Gollum eat?”
“Now that I've got some food in me, crawling through the air vents seems like a bad idea. And knocking out the bus boys is just mean.”
“I'm Dave.”
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