Press tour eats into a lot of my TV-watching and reviewing time (much of what I write this week, review-wise, will be of shows I screened before I came to tour), but I did manage to catch last night’s episodes of “Bob’s Burgers” and “Happy Endings,” and have a few quick thoughts coming up just as soon as I mount a dead fly from my windowsill production of “Pippin”…
One of my big disappointments of 2012 was falling very far behind on “Bob’s Burgers” because I always had to prioritize new shows and/or ones I was covering weekly. Every now and then, I’ll catch a stray one that only reminds me how much I like this show, and “Mother Daughter Laser Razor” was a particularly fine example of the show’s formula – a mix of silly, sweet and just plain strange (Tina’s “Terminator 2” nightmare about her leg hairs) in action. The cross-cutting between the screams at the leg waxing place and by Louise and her friend while they were forced to watch “Freaky Friday” was particularly funny, but I thought all the pieces fit together very well.
“Happy Endings,” meanwhile, began the first of several Sunday airings – ABC is going to have this show and “Don’t Trust the Bandana In Apt. 23” airing on both Sundays and Tuesdays for a while to get them off the air a little quicker than originally planned – with an episode that pushed the outer limits of both raunch (Dave’s various “I want you to come” songs/texts, the jerk circle, 79ing) and cartoonishness (the doppelgangers, Penny and Brad freaking out about the dead bird). And yet I thought the writing of certain sections, like the cold open listing all the Cons (even though I wish there was enough time/budget to actually show Rom-Con-Con, instead of just putting Alex in “Annie Hall” drag), or Max detailing the depths of his lonely life, were really very sharply-written and funny. (I’m still laughing at Max’s explanation of the Jeff and Stan Van Gundy sex dream, for instance.)
What did everybody else think?