Gagbismal

My last set of finales this season. This is a very bittersweet moment for me. The dot at the end of the 2010-2011 season. It’s been a good run.

Stay tuned throughout the summer though, I’ll figure out something to post. Maybe I’ll do a little listmaking, or some movie reviews, or maybe I’ll venture into some new category completely. Who knows, but whatever it is it should be awesome.

Spoilers...

Modern Family – “The One That Got Away” (B)

It’s a pity the producers didn’t go with last week’s episode for the season finale. For one, it was a graduation episode, which was a natural bookend in and of itself (named “See You Next Fall” if that wasn’t enough). And second, it was a much better episode than this week’s rather average affair. Even the obvious cliffhanger – Cam and Mitchell deciding to adopt another kid – didn’t really justify this episode as a finale. With the way ABC kept promoting one of the families making a major life decision, it wasn’t exactly hard to see what was coming.

I think maybe my problem with “The One That Got Away” was that the storylines were so fragmented it was hard to get invested in any of them. It was almost like an episode full of B stories. There were a few funny moments in each, but they were fleeting. Nothing really got fleshed out enough to leave any sort of lasting impression so as a whole “The One That Got Away” felt flat, perhaps even a little superficial.

I’m being hard on this episode, I know. If it were anything but the finale I wouldn’t be taking such issue with it, but finales need that extra kick and this episode just didn’t have it. With that said though, it’s not like it was all bad either. I’m starting to love the Pritchett’s new dog. That thing is freakin’ adorable. And you had to laugh at Gloria mistaking Jay’s desire to take up the saxophone for Jay’s desire to own a sexy phone.

I also really enjoyed Mitchell and Claire’s storyline. It’s a pity they didn’t get a little more screen time, but it was definitely fun watching them regress back to their childhoods. Their car ride home with Jay in the driver’s seat was by far the highlight of the episode for me. It makes you wonder why those two don’t get more storylines with each other, they have great chemistry.

Ed O’Neill deserves some serious credit for this episode as well. His story was one of the few that held up to the rather fragmented nature of the episode and a lot of that had to do with his strength as an actor. It’s was amazing just how funny watching Jay run errands could be, and the fact that most of them were for his own birthday party made it that much better. I especially liked his great little one-sided conversation with the dog groomer.

Looking back over this last season of Modern Family it’s been a pretty interesting year for the series. They’ve done their best to follow up their almost universally acclaimed first season by giving us some truly high quality episodes mixed in with a few average ones as well. Overall, I still think the series ranks as one of the better comedies on television today, but it’ll be interesting to see in what direction the third season takes us, whether the writers will be able to maintain to the quality of the show or whether it’ll start to taper off as many do in time. Modern Family still has a great cast so if the writing staff can keep giving them decent material, everything should work itself out nicely. Here’s hoping for many more funny seasons to come. 

** Note ** I did a little Wikipedia digging and it turns out last week’s episode was originally intended as the finale. It’s a pity they didn’t stick with their original instinct. ** Note **

Now for the quotes:

CAM: She’s gonna like you even if sports aren’t your thing.
MANNY: Aren’t my thing? I have a tennis racquet upstairs I only use as a bubble bath frother.

MITCHELL: Okay, that’s trespassing.
CLAIRE: No it’s not, we used to live here.
MITCHELL: I don’t think that does what you think it does.

MANNY: The catch part went fine... mostly. I took a running dive into the dirt.
CAM: Oh well, did you at least catch the ball?
MANNY: I was trying to throw the ball!

CAM: Gloria asked me to handle this. She’s going to yell at me Jay! She can be mean in Spanish.

CAM: Not so good with the bat?
MANNY: I am, as long as I’m using it to roll out dough.

JAY: You know what; I’m acting like a jerk. What am I 12?
LUKE: Hey!

And line of the episode:

JAY: (talking about a dog groomer) You know who did your job in my day? A hose.

Cougar Town – “Something Good Coming” (B+)

You’re right Ted, Hooch is crazy.

You have no idea how enormously happy it made me to see Ted Buckland back on television again. It really didn’t matter what happened in the rest of the episode, “Something Good Coming” was going to score high marks just for that cameo. I do have one question though – if Ted ran into Ellie (played by the lovely Christa Miller, who also played Jordan on Scrubs) in this episode would it have somehow ripped a hole in the space-time continuum?

It’s probably a good thing we didn’t find out. But regardless of the (imaginary) risks, I would love to see a few more of these Scrubs cameos. I was little sad that Gooch had apparently left Ted and ran off with Hooch (Laurie’s right, he didn’t stand a chance) but just watching Ted be Ted again was a delight. I loved his ability to turn any happy song into a sad song. I didn’t realize how much I missed Sam Lloyd’s music.

And yet the amazing part about this episode is that Ted Buckland wasn’t the only awesome cameo in it. If you looked closely in the background of the scene where Laurie tried to convince Trav to go back to college, besides a pretty blatant Subway plug (it sucks, but if it keeps the show on the air so be it) you would have found Danny Pudi, aka Abed from Community. Now there’s a couple reason why this cameo was so great. First off, Busy Philipps and Dan Byrd both made cameos in the Community season finale, so it was nice to see Cougar Town get their own cameo. And second, in Community’s My Dinner with Andre parody “Critical Film Studies” Abed actually told Jeff that he had done a background spot on Cougar Town. I mean, you’ve just got to love it when shows follow up on obscure crap like that.

Phew, that was a lot of time spent on cameos. As for the rest of the episode, I thought the trip to Hawaii went over pretty well. I liked the pairing of Bobby with Andy and Ellie. Andy and Bobby had some truly great bromance moments, my favourites being their secret door knocking language and the fact that Andy had to take Bobby bed shopping because the two of them “like the same firmness.” I also thought the whole toothbrush incident with Ellie was hilarious. The way Bobby and Andy kept compounding the lies just made it funnier and funnier.

I had a more mixed reaction to Grayson and Jules however. I really liked their ending. I’m happy the two of them didn’t break up over whether or not to have children, and I thought Jules’ “I would go on any adventure with you” line was an especially sweet way to finish off the episode, but much of the build-up to that moment was very missable. As much as I loved Jules’ morning routine song, their condom search wasn’t very funny, and a lot of the time this storyline felt like it was spinning its wheels just waiting for that ending to come.

The one thing I found a little peculiar about this episode was the Laurie/Trav storyline. I found it odd that Laurie went about convincing Trav to go back to college by basically seducing him and then pulling back the curtain to show him how stupid it is to make decisions based on chasing girls. I certainly can’t say I’ve seen a story like that one before. Don’t get me wrong, there was something oddly thoughtful about what she trying to do, it was just a strange way to go about it.

But I guess there’s always been something strange about Cougar Town, it’s actually what makes the show so enjoyable. And I do have to give them credit – they’ve won me over this past season. Before this year I barely gave Cougar Town a second thought and now I consider it one of my favourite shows. I can’t wait to see what the writers have in store for next season. I was reading somewhere that it’s going to be Bill Lawrence’s last, so hopefully he’s got a few great ideas saved up for his final season.

Now for the quotes:

JULES: So I called your college and told them you left school because your grandma has syphilis. It’s okay... there’s a little truth to that.
TRAV: Nana Cobb?
JULES: We’re moving her to a less swingy retirement home.

JULES: I don’t believe in ghosts because if they were real I’d like to think that I would be felt up all the time.

LAURIE: Just give me my parameters. Is middle school style okay – under the shirt over the bra – or are we going full on 9^th grade in which case I’m going to need to rent a hotel room or maybe a boat.

JULES: I just got the chills... or I was just felt up by my first ghost.

JULES: He lives in a shack. He sits on the beach all day and parties all night. What kind of life is that?
LAURIE: An awesome one.

JULES: Oh my god, I want to snort this!

JULES: (singing her morning routine song) Brush your teeth/wash your face/take your pills so you won’t get pregnant.

LAURIE: You know in ancient times Hawaiian warriors to prove their manhood would wait right here and battle sea turtles as they came in to breed.

And the quote of the episode:

JULES: It’s for the lady who likes to lounge by the pool but also get paid for sex.
LAURIE: You can do that? Is that a job?