A review of last night’s “Suburgatory” coming up just as soon as the kugel is a gateway kugel…
Ken Levine will sometimes write about “three percenters,” jokes that the writing staff loves even though they assume a tiny fraction of the audience will get them. The tag at the end of “Foam Finger” was a classic three percenter. If you’re a fan of both this show and “Homeland,” seeing Dalia aping Nick Brody and slipping away to the garage to read Torah was among the funniest sequences “Suburgatory” has ever done. If you don’t know “Homeland,” it’s still somewhat amusing to hear Carly Chaikin pronounce Hebrew words with her usual lack of affect, and the earlier scene with Evan rejecting her for being a shiksa set some of it up, but I imagine it was more puzzling than anything else.
As a die-hard “Homeland” viewer, I cackled so hysterically at the Torah bit that it significantly raised my opinion of an episode I’d been lukewarm on to that point.
The Dallas/George romance has to walk a very careful line where her behavior is extreme enough to be funny, and yet not so much that it would lead him to decide this is more trouble than it’s worth. Her faulty assumptions about what he wanted from his sex life – which led to him apparently not having sex at all – felt like it crossed to the wrong side of that line.
Tessa helping out Dalia worked better, both because Chaikin’s deadpan delivery is endlessly funny, and because the show has very delicately established this weird, largely unwanted bond between the two girls. I was expecting the KKK to start acting like Lisa once she became their new leader (though I suppose we’ve already seen Kimantha dressing that way in that episode last season where Dalia took Lisa under her wing), but the running gag about them being like stray puppies was both so absurd and so sparsely used that it ultimately worked.
But that garage scene? I’m still laughing thinking about it now.
What did everybody else think?