A review of tonight’s “Cougar Town” coming up just as soon as I wine-watch a documentary…
“Cougar Town” continues to cook with gas as we move through the early phase of season 3, this time with an episode directed by Courteney Cox herself. In fact, even though Passover is about a month away, “Full Moon Fever” all but demands an invocation of my old Dayenu rule – short version for newcomers and/or gentiles is that if an episode had featured any of a number of great things, it would have been enough (or, in Hebrew, “dayenu”) to be wholly satisfying. So rather than go for some deep analysis, let’s gather round the seder table a bit early to discuss the many ways in which “Full Moon Fever” was splendid:
* If the episode had just featured Laurie praying that her new Twitter boyfriend Wade was “super black” (and then wondering if she was being racist)… dayenu.
* If that subplot had only featured the “super black” running gag and Ellie being overcome with emotion at reading Wade’s frontline tweets to Laurie (complete with a sad “What what?”)… dayenu.
* If the episode had only featured Grayson bragging on his days as a Montgomery Ward underwear model… dayenu.
* If Andy and Jules’ argument over who’s the true king of the cul-de-sac had only culminated in Andy hosing down Jules, and then Jules siccing Stan on Andy… dayenu.
* If we had only gotten those hose-related hijinx and a pitch-perfect spoof of the iconic battle sequence at the middle of “Braveheart,” complete with a lipstick-faced Ian Gomez going nuts with the Scottish accent, being on a horse, and Andy having a damn clever plan to foil the Bicycle Boys… dayenu.
Heart and silliness and joy. That’s “Cougar Town,” and it was all way more than enough tonight.
A few other thoughts:
* On the one hand, I like that they’re continuing the running gag from the zipline episode about Jules not knowing anything about movies. On the other, I can’t help think back to both the “Shawshank Redemption” homage from the season 1 episode where the series found itself (“Don’t Come Around Here No More”), and also to the movie mash-up game, where Jules was presented as not knowing as much about movies as others, but not being completely ignorant about them.
* Bill Lawrence keeps the “Scrubs” guest star pipeline humming as Sarah Chalke makes her first appearance as Angie, Travis’ photography professor and Bobby’s potential love interest. That storyline also provided the latest in what seems like very frequent incidences this season of shirtless Bobby. Brian Van Holt clearly got himself into fantastic shape in the offseason (not that he was a hideous blob before), and Bobby does seem like the kind of guy who’d go without a shirt whenever possible, so why not?
What did everybody else think?