
Things I laughed at in tonightās 2 Broke Girls:
1.)Ā Ā Ā Kat Denningsā evident glee when she said āTHIN ICE!ā with Big Bill.
2.)Ā Ā Ā The way Jennifer Coolidge pronounced āYelpā in a thick, Eastern European accent
That was it.
Now, Iām the worldās biggest believer in the idea that comedy doesnāt have to be funny. If the characters are pleasant and the world of the show is at least somewhat interesting, Iāll hang out for some moderately fun times. (Iām looking at you, Up All Night!) In some ways, I think the push toward more and more jokes, rather than more and more character moments was what broke comedy in the late ā90s and created a rut the genre is still crawling its way out of. If youāre just going to overload on jokes, the jokes have to be funny as shit, and thatās a pace no set of comedy writers can keep up. Even 30 Rock, the most joke-heavy show of the current glut of good comedies, has a strong central relationship at its core, one the show can fall back on whenever the gags just arenāt working.
But thatās not the case with 2 Broke Girls, not by a long shot. The show is aiming for the solid āthree jokes per minuteā structure of the classic multi-camera sitcoms, and too many of the jokes arenāt landing. For the most part, writing funnier jokes is something thatās pretty easy for a sitcom to do, particularly at this stage in its run, when the actors are settling into their roles and the writers know exactly what each performer is and isnāt capable of. The back half of season one is when many of the great sitcoms really found their voices, so itās a naturally fertile time for even bad shows to figure out what theyāre going to be doing going forward.
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Hereās the weirdest part: 2 Broke Girls is still trying new stuff. This isnāt to say that thereās anything wrong with shows that try to push boundaries or figure out what is or isnāt possible. But this is a show that doesnāt have a formula at all. It hasnāt even bothered finding one. Normally, youād think Iād be saying this like it was a good thing, but Iām not sure it is in this case. If youāve watched every episode of this show, is there an episode that you can point to and say, āEvery episode of the show looks something like that oneā? Iām not sure there is, weird as that seems to me. Both the best and worst episodes of the show seem to occupy separate universes from each other, even as they self-evidently feature the same characters and central ideas. One of the reasons itās easy for fans of the show to ignore whatās so awful about, say, the diner scenes is because everything involving Earl and Han and Oleg seems to be happening on another show entirely, one that isnāt as good as the scenes featuring just Max and Caroline.
Now, obviously, the biggest reason this show doesnāt have stronger jokes is because the writers rely on an unending string of puns and crude sex gags, but I think another part of it is that the show doesnāt have any underlying solid foundation to play off of. When the audience knows roughly what to expect, the writers and actors can play with those expectations. As much as I find Oleg making crude sex jokes stupid, at least thatās one area where the writers are able to play with what we expect to happen, as we saw in the scene tonight where Sophie smacked him around a little bit after he said he wanted to Gisele her Bundchens. This wasnāt the pinnacle of wit or terribly funny, but it was a scenario that was built around what we expected would happen when the two characters came into conflict. Thatās a foundation stronger writers could build something on top of.
But without a strong foundation, we get a show thatās weirdly reliant on repeating the conflicts of the pilot. Tonightāafter over a dozen episodes that were all about how much better Caroline and Max are together than apartāwe get yet another episode thatās about whether one of the two will leave the other of the two in the lurch. I get the need to show the friendship solidifying in the early going, but Iām not sure why the show is repeating this point over and over this late in the game. Weāve seen the title. We know the friendship between the two is at the center, and weāre more than willing to take it as a given. The series remains way too enamored of its āOne of them is rich, and one of them is poor!ā conceit, and it often seems like thatās the only thing it knows how to use to build stories.
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Anyway, all of that is moot because in tonightās episode, Caroline saved a model whoād overdosed on pills by dumping hydrogen peroxide down his throat and thumping him a few times in the diaphragm. Leaving aside whether this would work (Iām going to assume it would because Michael Patrick King, in addition to being the greatest writer of all time is also an expert in human physiognomy), Iām just going to comment on how weird this whole thing was. Youāre seriously going to end the episode with a bit where a model almost dies? And where previous episodes have played up Carolineās business acumen or organizational and social smarts as reasons for Max to keep her around, this one is going to suggest that one of the advantages of being a rich girl is that you learn how to save models whoāve overdosed? On top of that, itās a tremendously weird sequence because it doesnāt seem to have any stakes or consequences. Thereās just a guy whoās almost dying, then Caroline saves him with plucky optimism. Itās a bizarre conceit to begin with, and making it the thing that the entire episode hinges upon is even stranger.
But letās look beyond that! Letās look at the long string of predictable fat jokes in Big Billās apartment! Letās look at the way that the studio audience only seems to perk up when Oleg is making double entendres! (They were quite perky tonight.) Letās observe how the ātaking a photo for the websiteā idea was raised in that first scene, then quickly shoved aside before being brought back at the end again (something the show often does)! And letās watch how the supporting charactersāawful as they areācontinue to be shunted off into one tiny, tiny scene per episode, as though someone somewhere is fulfilling a contractual obligation! Whatās fascinating about 2 Broke Girls at this point isnāt that itās a bad show; itās that itās a bad show thatās bad in entirely different ways each week, to the point where it occasionally makes a pretty good episode, entirely by accident. It might seem obvious at this point, but this wasnāt one of those.
Stray observations:
- Kat Dennings just looks weird when she smiles. Check out her odd grin in that final photo the two take on the subway.
- This is a stupid sitcom thing that Iād go along with if the show were better, but itās so ridiculous that those two women would dress like that when they were going to clean somebodyās apartment, no matter how hot they thought the model might be.
- I continue to like Jennifer Coolidge as Sophie quite a bit, and I hope the show has something to do with her beyond, āLetās have Jennifer Coolidge come in and do a funny accent.ā
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