It’s evening round-up time, with quick thoughts on tonight’s New Girl and Brooklyn Nine-Nine coming up just as soon as I’ve been re-Vined by Rob Kardashian…
New Girl has done a good job so far in not making every Reagan story and joke revolve around her looking like Megan Fox. Sometimes, though, you have to take advantage of the assets you’re given, and “The Decision” had some fun with Reagan doing exactly that to prove a point to Nick and Winston about their indecisiveness. Fox was very good at playing all that stuff with a wink, but the story was mainly there to let Jake Johnson and Lamorne Morris play deranged like only they can, which was a treat. Winston crushing on Aly isn’t my favorite development, in that their dynamic has been plenty funny without it, but with Nasim Pedrad doing a FOX pilot, she may not be long for New Girl anyway, so this is likely the first step towards writing her out. And in the meantime, it inspired that bizarrely great super-slow group sing of “Motownphilly.”
Brooklyn Nine-Nine, meanwhile, gave us one of this season’s more frantically-paced episodes in “Adrian Pimento.” The title character, played by Jason Mantzoukas, was such a tonal departure from what the show usually does – as Terry notes after the first of Pimento’s blood-soaked flashbacks – that it really needed more time to properly develop, as opposed to being squeezed into an episode with two subplots that also weren’t fully-baked. I like the idea of revisiting Jake’s undercover stint from the end of season 1 – and him revealing that it was much less exciting than he usually describes – and Mantzoukas was fun (particularly when Pimento was yelling at the checkout clerk), but in a season where the show has struggled with its pacing at times, this was probably the most rushed story. The Mean Marge subplot at least brought over Kate Flannery from The Office, and had the line of the episode (“Terry’s gonna die saving a president, or Terry’s never gonna die!”), and I enjoyed watching the fake Holt start copying the real captain’s mannerisms, but this one was forgettable overall.
What did everybody else think?