Grid Effect

The follow up wasn’t as strong as the pilot, but it still delivered what we like to see from a comedy. One thing we didn’t question about this series in last week’s review is the potential long-term issues they may have. For one thing, how many awkward scenarios are you going to be able to create for Tim to find himself in, with it still seeming at least plausible enough that the audience will be able to suspend disbelief and still find it enjoyable. This dawned on me last night when they aired an episode in which Tim passed for Latino for the first ten minutes of it. And when I watched a video online where he had to armwrestle an old woman to sit next to an emergency exit on a plane.

But, in its current state, Life and Times of Tim is a top three comedy on television for us (after Office and It’s Always Sunny). In the first installment, “Latino Tim”, Tim’s boss needed to prove OMNICorp was meeting its affirmative action quotas, and demanded Tim pretend to be Latino, and was able to leverage him with the offer of a promotion. Tim, of course, begrudgingly went along with the plan because while you are capable of saying “no” in this universe, you are ultimately incapable of refusing outlandish requests (”Are you sure that’s a small request”).

Did we ever mention how much we enjoy the intro music for this series?

So in the course of fifteen minutes, Tim gave a speech at a minorities in the corporate world convention (I can’t remember the exact title for it, but the acronym was NAMBLA), subjected his girlfriend to being spat on, and made a spectacle out of The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch where he invited the prostitute from last week’s episode to pose as his latino wife. All of this was naturally hilarious. But we can’t help but wonder how long we will continue to find this amusing. The series jumped unforgivingly from a meeting with his numbskull boss (who’s probably the best character they have to offer) to airing on a national news show. While the material itself is funny, it is a lot to ask of an audience to simply gloss over the inconceivable nature of just about everything that happened.

The second half of last night’s episode, “The Priest Is Drunk”, Tim attended the wedding of his girlfriend’s sister and managed to be blamed for every insubordinate act the priest was responsible for, before being caught massaging his girlfriend’s grandmother’s breast per the grandmother’s request.

In short, it was the better of the two, and probably because it was the more grounded of the two. Don’t get me wrong, everything that happens in “The Priest Is Drunk” is improbable at best. But it isn’t set in an alternate universe like ‘Latino Tim” is. Both were good and had their own style, however the latter half simply provided more memorable scenes.

Both had callbacks to episode one, so it doesn’t look like the series will lack continuity like we originally thought, which ironically will hurt its chances for renewal. Something they probably won’t have to worry about anyways if the dismally low response on TWoP is any indication. But we got the return of the prostitute in “Latino Tim”, and Tim’s girlfriend referencing said incident in “The Priest Is Drunk”. If we keep getting episodes like this, we will continue to recommend and enjoy them, but we aren’t sure if that is going to help their cause.