It’s the last big review of the season...
Spoilers:
Cougar Town – “My
Life/Your World” (B+)
The season started with a proposal, it seems only natural
that it would end with a wedding.
But we’ll get to that. The first half of “My Life/Your World”
played very much like a normal episode (the cut for syndication was quite
obvious I thought) with the writers exploring Grayson’s adjustment to actually living
in the same house with Jules. Grayson has always been a bit more private than
Jules and the rest of the gang, so I thought his reaction off the top of the
episode was quite fitting to his character. His freak out in the bedroom was a
little scary, but more hilarious than anything and the therapy session with
Lynn afterwards made it even more worth it.
And it all ended up playing into a nice little homage to
Groundhog Day, probably my favourite Bill Murray comedy of all time, which is
saying something considering how chalked full of life lessons they tend to be
(just ask Jules). Overall the “My Life”
portion stayed light and saved most of the big finale moments for the second
half of the night.
Which unfortunately is sort of where the episode got a
little scattered in my opinion. There were a lot of fun moments in the Napa Valley
trip but it was obvious that with the wedding reserved for the beach back in
Florida the writers struggled to find a suitable ending for that portion of the
episode. In fact, most of the big Napa plotlines ended up falling short of the
mark. Jules’ attempt to get Jill/Tampa to the wedding was alright, but Ellie’s
seemingly out of nowhere crush on the hotel concierge was a little
disconcerting and the big twist at the end of the trip – Trav’s naked
confession to Laurie about his true feelings – just sort of got brushed to the
side for next season. The trip lacked payoff and in the end it felt anticlimactic
because of that.
But I think maybe anticlimactic was how it was supposed to
feel. The merit of “Your World” really hinges on whether or not you thought the
wedding was worth moving back to Florida. Frankly, I do. The Napa trip may have
never quite gotten off the ground, but the wedding was an excellent tribute to the
series long love story between Jules and Grayson. Everything from the
(literally) moving ceremony to Stan’s turn as ring bearer to Jules and Grayson
riding off into the sunset was executed perfectly. And none of it would have
been possible if they’d kept the wedding in Napa. That fact for me saved the
episode.
It’s been a tumultuous year for Cougar Town, one that saw the
series pushed back to midseason and to the brink of cancellation, only to be
saved in the 11th hour by TBS. Most of the episodes were written in a vacuum
with even the producers of the show wondering if they were still going to be on
the air come the end of the season. But thankfully, much like the question playfully
posed in the opening credits, this was just a season finale and not a series
finale. Cougar Town still has plenty of life in it yet, and that, my friends,
is something to be happy about.
