Date Posted: April 11, 2011
By Amy Van Veen (Staff Writer) – Email
With only a morsel of the shows this week being new ones, it was an easy one to get through with the semester breathing down my neck. Wednesday brought some new Sunshine among a couple of hilarious The Middle reruns and one of Modern Family. Thursday night NBC only brought forth Perfect Couples and Outsourced along with CBS’s Big Bang Theory. Next week the goodness starts once more with new episodes all around and, most notably, Will Ferrell visits The Office.
Mr. Sunshine has a special blast-from-the-past guest star and ABC has a small kind of Class reunion. Lizzy Caplan, who has played both the angst-ridden teen from Mean Girls and the angst-ridden adult from The Class with Andrea Anders, who plays Alice, and also Mitchell from Modern Family. This week she acted as Ben’s one night stand that got complicated when it turns out she’s Crystal’s new assistant. The good news is, though, that she is the female version of Ben: scared of anything more than a sexual connection and content in sitting in an arrested state of maturity when it comes to relationships. However, poor Ben begins to grow once again when it comes to relationships, but his desire to be her boyfriend is suppressed by her desire to keep a one night stand going. Roman, however, is the key to Ben’s happiness as he softens the hard heart of Vivian with his sad puppy personality. According to Crystal’s surprisingly happy despite his obvious emotional scars son, “Instead of one mom, I had seven! And this Asian dad. His name was Brett Wong.” He has found maternal (and sometimes paternal) comfort in his mother’s assistants and Vivian is no different. Plus he’s the perfect third wheel to Ben’s quasi-dates in his “super secret one-sided relationship”. Meanwhile, Crystal has fallen for a frank and mysterious BMX biker who desires to jump his bike over her. In the end, he crashes and declares his love for her, and she quickly loses interest and realizes that she needs to care for her son. Thanks to Vivian’s influence, though, Roman finds the strength to tell his mom to “show, don’t tell” how she feels about him. Roman’s growing up. Ben’s growing up. Vivian’s leaving. And Alonzo finally cracks his happy-go-lucky outer shell when the mascot guy takes his miniature Zen garden rake.
Big Bang Theory starts out with Shamy hanging out, and not virtually! They’re getting kicks and giggles from sitting in on a book reading of an author who is “making science palatable for the masses” and Sheldon heckles in his own special Dr. Cooper way. During this fun outing, Amy tempts Sheldon into dipping his toes into the world of “gossip as an aid to social bonding” when she shares news about Bernie wanting to break up with Howard. This is then shared with Leonard, which goes through Priya, and then to Raj who secretly loves Bernadette and then Leonard shares it with Penny who originally shared it with Amy. Shamy are so intrigued by this element of the social sciences, that they begin an experiment on their friends in order to test the phenomenon known as gossip. All they need is one piece of tantalizing gossip and one piece of benign gossip and, of course, they choose the coitus of Shamy. Wildfire. In the end, Howard proposes to Bernie, Bernie says yes, and Shamy have dirty unintended puns. Oh, and this episode has probably the greatest amount of quotes this season including “what an elf I would have made”, “shut your ass” and “everyone was set atwitter, although oddly no one tweeted”. Gang of nerds, you are definitely stepping up your nerdtastic game.
Perfect Couples celebrated a wedding, or, they were supposed to. What they did celebrate was achieving true originality in a sitcom, well maybe not true originality, but at least unexpectedness. Wedding rehearsals started off Thursday night’s episode with Leigh running through every possible wedding disaster, most of them including the MOH (Maid of Honour, for those ignorant of wedding lingo). Vance’s behaviour has Amy worried and she and Leigh put Dave in charge of keeping on top of him, or as Leigh overuses the phrase, “keep on his jock”. Near the beginning, too, we get another glimpse at the gloriousness that is Julia when Amy tells Dave she is not a pretty crier – cut to a horrid, tearful shot of Julia watching Dirty Dancing. Dave and Julia have a competition over whose speech of Vance and Amy’s meeting will win everyone’s hearts, and when the MOH gets priority speech, Dave tells all of the guests the story anyways, just to make sure she doesn’t get to tell it. Vance thinks he falls in love with the minister, and when he tries to tell Amy his friends tackle him and offer up an excellent scene of a man pile whispering a plan of action in front of a dressed and ready bridal party. Rex really wants to be part of the wedding and when the flower girl gets pink eye, he jumps in as flower man. He just feels funny with the tiny flower basket, but he feels even funnier when the bride and groom both stand up the wedding. Vance and Amy bump into one another with tickets in their hands at the airport and they call the wedding off while everyone is waiting for them. Dave has to break the news and everyone is forced to see Julia’s ugly crying face until Leigh makes Rex cover her head with his jacket. This show has so many good quirks, they’ve just taken a while to let them truly shine. Either that, or the strange new tone has taken audiences a while to catch on.
Outsourced is feeling a little like a one trick pony. The cultural difference is funny, sure. An American working in an Indian call centre, sure, it causes some humour. But how many times can the same joke be laughed at? The characters are fairly diverse, so that’s good, and Gupta is always ready to offer some laughs either at his expense or not. Thursday night saw Charlie looking for a job, but the problem is he’s not so good with the whole interview process, especially at a lingerie call-in centre. Unsurprisingly, he turns to Todd for help, but power dynamics get awkward when Charlie, a former manager, has to deal with reporting to Todd, the actual manager. He offends Madhuri, he offends the customers, and he eventually has to be fired. On his birthday. Rajiv, meanwhile, is trying to blackmail his way into getting a white guilt loan to pay for a wonderful honeymoon for his Vimy. When the people at Karmic Cash need to see him, though, he uses Gupta as his pathetic face and eventually gets found out. Charlie eventually finds a job, thanks to Todd, being the new “world record guy” on the street by eating the most hot peppers. It’s fairly funny, but is still finding trouble hitting its stride.
BBT: Amy Farrah-Fowler nee Blossom? You’re finally getting funny.
