Date Posted: May 2, 2011
By Amy Van Veen (Staff Writer) – Email
CBS forgot about Monday night. FOX brought only one show to the table with some Inca tea and Hope’s sleep training. ABC learned a new word, “pexting” and started a new Twitter account, @TheLarmy. Sheldon Cooper goes out with the girls and things get a little c-razy. And NBC gave us not only a birth and Lizbianism, but also two extended shows featuring a tearful goodbye to one of the most beloved and transformed characters on television and Leslie Knope as a topless centaur. Good week. Very good week.
Tuesday night’s Raising Hope was all about trying new things. Frank wants to start a fight club, but realized how hard it is to follow the first rule of fight club and still be able to invite people to fight club. It’s the tricky part the movie passed over. Meanwhile, Jimmy is dealing with the burden of being an uptight wuss, especially when his girlfriend invites him to an art class and turns out to be the nude model who, as Virginia puts it, “waves her woo-hoo around for everyone to see.” Burt and Virginia’s rich friends who aren’t perfect, Sylvia and Donovan, pass on all of their old stuff to the Chances. It’s a perk I wouldn’t mind having myself. They get a Dyson fan! And a pretty picture of a sunset, well it’s a snowboard, but Burt doesn’t know any better. Virginia even gets glam nails that make her look like a senator’s mistress. In addition to stuff, they get some serious life lessons from Sylvia and Donovan, namely the idea of sleep training and weaning a baby off sleep dependency. Burt goes out and buys a book (enter shock) and learns about this sleep training idea. They coddled Jimmy too much and he was never able to face his fears, namely that of the dog-head man that Maw-Maw scarred him with as a child. He doesn’t want that for his daughter, but he’s also not strong enough to teach her otherwise, so Burt bites the bullet and does his best to withstand Hope’s endless crying. Jimmy, meanwhile, feels that it is necessary to prove himself a bad-ass, so he goes with Zooey to a restaurant, which is actually the apartment of a friend of hers who is under house arrest, and gets Jimmy to drink the tea, which leads them to break into the grocery store, which leads Jimmy to freak out and call his mom. However, after the success of Hope’s sleep training, Burt helps Virginia to stay strong and sleep train their adult son. Poor guy. He’s left hallucinating on the grocery store floor until Frank and Barney come in for fight club and Barney drives him home, knowing full well the side effects of Inca tea. Everything is going well, until Jimmy hallucinates and Barney turns into the dog-head man! He runs home, being followed by Barney the dog-head man, and while his parents cower inside doing their best to teach him a life lesson. He ends up facing his fears and punching Barney in the face, giving Barney everything he wanted from fight club. Oh the Chances! Never a dull moment. Yet never too ridiculous.
The new show of subtle and growing humour comes back with only one episode this week, which means either ABC has more faith in Happy Endings or they’re running out of episodes to burn through. Brad’s father is in town, Francis. It’s also Damon Wayans, the father of Damon Wayans, Jr. and, not surprisingly, the two of them hardly have Jane-like communications skills with their feelings and emotions. In the single girl world, Penny is feeling in a slump after she gets pexted by her latest guy, so she and Alex go out and try to un-slump themselves. Things get interesting when some guy hits on them by sending them ribs, so they decide to make a drinking game out of the night: any time a guy starts to get creepy, they take a shot. Once they’re hammered, two handsome and charming Italian gentlemen come over and Penny begins to speak fluent Italian, a skill she did not know she had, and Alex gorges herself on the ribs. The next morning while the two are nursing their hangovers, Penny cannot decipher the handsome Italian guy’s voicemail, so Alex orders up a round or two or three of mimosas so she can understand it. That one semester Penny spent in Florence must have worked its way into her subconscious. In the single male world, Max doesn’t pick up groceries, he picks up dart guns and he and Dave shoot anything and everything. Brad’s dad, back in marriage land, has some tests in the hospital and when the doctor weirdly tells Brad the good news that everything is fine and not Francis, Jane pushes him to say ‘I love you,’ which then leads Francis to think he’s dying and has a panic attack. His life comeback plan? Avoid saying “I love you” back and wear an orange velour track suit. Jane suggests a dad-date; cue the “Cats in the Cradle” montage with the Wayans in matching tracksuits. The two single worlds mix when Alex goes to see Dave and Max after she offended the Italians by faking a Mario moustache and the three of them try their best to shoot the creepy mini kimono guy across the street. After some stealthy breaking and entering by Max, they finally manage to shoot through the guy’s window, and then light his place on fire. His mini kimono gets burnt and Mrs. Klein, their elderly neighbour, gets discovered after laying with a broken pelvis for six days. Conclusion? They’re heroes. Penny wakes up one morning with one of the Italians, but can’t understand his emotional story about his drunk and abusive father until she herself gets hammered on the vodka in her freezer. That relationship doesn’t last, but she does get to lift her mood by going over to mini kimono guy’s place and shooting him in, as Brad says, the “sex nose” with a dart gun. It’s a magical land, and somehow manages to be slightly different than Traffic Light and far better than Mad Love.
Cougar Town gets embarrassing, even more embarrassing than usual. Bobby Cobb has his first pro golf tournament and Andy is the only one who gets to go along as his caddy. It’s not at all a recipe for disaster. Jules sponsors an African child but little Omari’s letters are getting a little repetitive, so she thinks the crew should do more charity work, and then she realizes that everyone does more charity work than her. “LAUGH.” Laurie has started a Twitter account, @TheLarmy. It stands for “The Laurie’s Army,” or an “army of jellybeans” as Ellie so astutely points out. Before Bobby leaves, Jules forces everyone to gather around and send their positive vibes, even The Larmy is sending their “twibes” out for Bobby. As Jules heads out with Laurie to do some charity work at the local public school library, Travis, Grayson and Ellie go head to head with Gray’s new bar trivia game which severely embarrasses Trav as he comes in last, which means he has to be the one who drives two hours to bring Bobby his lucky visor. Good thing he went, too, because within minutes Bobby has climbed into his duffel bag and gotten stuck and Andy’s ears are plugged and his balance is subsequently affected, so Travis is in charge. At the school library, Jules does her best with the Pledge of Allegiance, but when it comes to “for which it stands,” she has always believed it to be “for Richard Stands.” Poor girl. She’s feeling pretty down-trodden, but it’s okay, because they’re all dumb, and the event is never to be spoken of again. Until she catches a guy staring at her as if he knows, which her friends assure her he is not, but it turns out he is. And he told Barb. Who tells the whole bar during their psychically strong good vibes being sent to Bobby. Jules then prays a selfish prayer for the spotlight to be taken off of her, then Bobby hits another guy’s ball and celebrates his victory that wasn’t a victory. Jules turned him into Bobby “Wrong Balls” Cobb, which has been turned into a T-shirt, and Jules feels so terrible she buys up every non-refundable shirt only to realize that they were created by Bobby and he’s making a huge profit off of his fail. According to Wrong Balls, “You can’t hear the world laughing at you if you’re laughing harder. You’ve gotta own it, sugar.” Jules tries to follow this train of thought and does alright redoing the Pledge of Allegiance until she messes up again and cuddles up with her crew and Big Carl.
Dr. Sheldon Cooper meets his match on the new episode of Big Bang Theory when Priya, Leonard’s girlfriend slash lawyer, finds flaws and exceptions in his once assumed iron-clad roommate agreement. When a bathroom emergency gets turned down and then dinner out becomes Greek food, Sheldon’s least favourite, he desperately reaches out to Penny for some culinary assistance like an I-talian treat. She’s heading out for girls’ night, though, and invites Shelly along for some drinks, dinner and Priya-bashing. Girls’ night out gets c-razy and once Amy Farrah-Fowler gets a drink or two in her, she gets a little frisky with her words towards Shelly, “You smell like baby powder. You’re like a sexy toddler.” Bernie’s first bash on Priya? Pantsuits. Which Amy needs context for, pantsuits are bad, and then she’s good. The attention turns toward Shelly after Bernie sings about Amy and Sheldon sitting in a tree, “K-I-S-S-S-S-I-N-G.” Apparently, the only woman Shelly has kissed outside of his family is the elderly nun who passed out from heat stroke, and Amy readily lets him know she’s available for experimentation. The next adventure for girls’ night out? Dancing with Sheldon. Even though Bernie thinks he’ll look like “a spider on a hot plate,” his dancing skills are more than par thanks to the cotillion he was forced to attend as a Southern-bred child. After the wildness of a night out, Amy invites Sheldon into her apartment for some Yoohoo (the drink, not the euphemism), and after introducing him to her chain smoking monkey (again, this is literal), she kisses him, and then promptly throws up. The night out with the girls ends up giving Sheldon the confidence to stand up to Priya, with a countdown and a threat to tell her parents about her and Leonard. Countdown to the destruction of Preonard has also begun. By the by, Drs. Cooper and Hofstadter own a Dyson lamp. Watch for it. And hopefully watch for more girls’ nights out with Shelly.
Next: Shirley has a baby, Micheal Scott bids a tearful goodbye, and Liz Lemon gets tasered
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