Grid Effect

This was probably the worst episode of the series, much less the season. To the best of my recollection I only laughed twice during the half hour, and both times that I laughed I felt like I was doing so out of an obligation to make the time I spent watching it seem worthwhile.

For starters, while we liked the Prime Minister in the episode preceding this one, this week it seemed like he was given too much screen time. Actually, it wasn’t necessarily him being given too much time, but the love interest they brought on to give him more material. If just felt…unnecessary. Even if you thought it was funny it wasn’t exceptionally so, he’s not going to be a permanent character so I can’t imagine there will be any continuity and the woman wasn’t given any material to work with, so what was the point?

These site gags still hold strong.

We will give the actor credit for this, one of the two times we laughed occurred when he was trying to convince Murray to let him drive the tour bus (which the end result of was predictable), and Murray obliging because he asked nicely. Between that and the Bret and Jemaine’s experimenting with the hair gel, we had our subtle and forgettable highlights of this episode.

The premise was solid. I like the idea of the haplessly trying to develop a New Zealand equivalent to Chinatown and Bret and Jemaine relying on hair gel in the same manner a drug addict relies on drugs, but outside of the initial experimentation which included Bret  making a “j” with his bangs and their hostility towards Mel, none of it really worked. In fact, it reminded me a little too much of the It’s Always Sunny episode with Dee and Dennis going on welfare for it to seem like the idea wasn’t ripped from the FX series.

The two songs, while I liked the lead in to the first one, were superfluous. They weren’t funny, memorable, engaging or thoughtful. The songs, much like this episode, felt like they were mailed in. We know the music end of this show must be terribly difficult to keep fresh and entertaining, so we’d recommend if not dropping it altogether, then at least cutting back a tad.

I don’t want to dwell on this because the show has had so many great installments that it feels needlessly tedious to drone on and on about everything I didn’t like about this episode,  So we’ll just leave it here. Back with some links later.