Grid Effect

Welcome, welcome. Hope all had a great weekend. If you’re a sports fan it was almost impossible to have a bad one. If you live in Florida, specifically in Tampa, you’re probably still hungover because out of nowhere you’ve managed to control your own destiny and actually cherry pick a national title game on a transitional year in college football. If you live in Ohio, specifically Columbus, then you recognize that this season is eerily similar to 2002. Oh, and in both college football and professional baseball, you’re prepared to see your team come in second place yet again (2006 OSU football and basketball, 2006-07 Cleveland Cavaliers, 2007 Columbus Destroyers).

Anyhow, enough rehashing my gambling debts. To the meaning of the post…

A couple comedic threads lifted from Friends episodes of all places last night. One with Tim Meadow’s wife’s dog (Rachel once purchased a dog reminiscent of her childhood, that could be easily mistaken for a different species) and another with coitus while under the weather (Monica trying to get pregnant and coercing Chandler into sex). They do seem to be stretched for material, but between Leon’s misadventures and Suzie’s translation tactics, the episode was definitely an improvement over last week.

One does get the sense that Larry David and the rest are sort of going through the motions, but sometimes that pans out in their favor. Originality isn’t the lone form of success. It probably also helped that David Steinberg was directing, and JB Smoove has really become a highlight of this short season, so the supporting cast is helping. Is anyone curious as to why Tim Meadows didn’t play himself? I figured spending over a decade on SNL would give someone, at the very least, enough name recognition to appear as an exaggerated version of himself on Curb. Guess not. Also, we still can’t really figure out why Vivica Fox has taken this role.

But so many of the jokes just felt far-fetched and, honestly, desperate. I’ve always been a Larry David apologist. Even after the much maligned Seinfeld series finale I defended it like people were insulting my grandmother. But last night, is there really any way Tim Meadows’ character mistakes Larry’s hand-drying as derogatory sign-language? Or that Leon and Larry just don’t look at their phones to see if one person or the other is lying about not receiving any phone calls? Or for that matter, would Tim Meadows really believe that Larry was actually on the receiving end of his return call? I guess that could be explained that they both felt guilty for fucking each other over, so they decided to let bygones be bygones? But this sounds out of character for Larry and Leon.

Never the less, Larry’s dismissal of Leon’s prospective employers and Leon’s trashing of Tim Meadows was hilarious. Probably the highpoint of the episode, if not Larry’s confiding all his petty issues with Jeff, which never fails to deliver. Jeff seems to be the only character that he is honest with, and watching him air his grievances in a comfortable setting is a change of pace from the dismissive Cheryl or hostile everybody else. Honestly, who else would listen to someone bitch about their toaster and take them seriously other than a person you’re giving 10% of a goldmine too?

One can just see the registering of being unfairly blamed on Larry’s face.

The thing with the exterminator and his mock high school date with Larry was somewhat out of character for this series. But it climaxed well with the exterminator stomping the rat dog to death, believing it was, in actuality, a rat. Considering the overly PC LA schoolyard was traumatized earlier when Larry took out a spider in a similar fashion, I would have liked to have seen the backlash after the exterminator took out a dog in the auditorium.

Ultimately it was a decent episode, and reminded me more of seasons past than any episode yet this season (sans “The Anonymous Donor”). It just seems that right now, the good is narrowly outweighing the bad, something I thought I’d never say about this comedian or this series.