Television Yak

This was a good week for coitus interruptus in prime-time sitcom land, getting a shout-out in both Modern Family and NBC’s latest Veronica’s Closet/Suddenly Susan/The Single Guy/Just Shoot Me time-filler clone, Perfect Couples. Which is an ironic title, because they’re not perfect! In fact, they’re all fucking insufferable! Ha ha ha!

The cold open to Perfect Couples manages to cram most of what I loathe about this show into a single tedious gag. The three titular couples, in their bedrooms, and the women (played by Olivia Munn, some other pretty lady, and a third pretty lady) are all hogging the sheets and mattresses. Am I right, fellas? Your hot wife taking up fifty-one percent of the bed, what’s up with that? Is this thing on?

Imagine you’re in this situation, you share a bed with someone and they’re sprawled across the length of it. And further assume that you’re a socially functioning human being, how would you deal with this? You might gentle nudge your partner and say something like, “Sorry to wake you, honey, but would mind scooching over a bit? Thanks, love you, good night.” It’s not exactly hilarious, and it certainly doesn’t swiftly characterize and distinguish your relationship, but in fifteen seconds or so, problem solved. Perfect Couples has a few other ideas: Munn’s husband tries charming his way into bed by reciting pop psychological aphorisms straight from a self-help book, the brunette lady’s white-bread husband coaxes the dog into barking and waking her up, and the scraggly husband with an incongruously hot girlfriend just tries passive-aggression, emphasis on the aggression. I can’t decide which of these dudes I hate the most, whether it’s the touchy-feely pussy one or the boring whipped one or the violent and psychopathic one.

Perfect Couples continues the next twenty-two minutes as the same “comedy” of broad strokes, vapid signifiers and non-communication that left me too frustrated with these idiots to be amused. Somewhere mid-episode, Perfect Couples brings out the most irritating sitcom trope ever — the neighbors who walk right in the front door without being invited or even knocking. It so happens that, in addition to all being related in some sort of confusing, incestuous web that I didn’t bother paying attention to, all three of these couples live with walking distance of each other, apparently in suburbia’s newest childless-hipster gentrified neighborhood. And they don’t have locks on their doors. Tonight is White-Bread and Brunette’s anniversary — which White-Bread initially forgets about, naturally — and tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Right when they start having under-the-covers sex, Scraggly Guy barges into their bedroom to whine and mope about the blonde girl he’d previously kicked out of bed, then hate-fucked into going dancing with him, and then lied when it turned out that by “dancing” he meant “game night” and she dumped him — and nobody tosses his ass out on the sidewalk because he’s in their bedroom on their anniversary while they’re fucking, seriously.

And then Olivia Munn and her husband come into the bedroom and they start this whole hippie-dippy consolation therapy session and holy God there are not enough italics on the planet for me express my disgust with these people!

As you can probably tell, Munn is the only Perfect Couples cast member I’m remotely familiar with. I never saw Attack of the Show because the G4 network is somewhere around channel 20,000 on my cable system and I can’t be bothered venturing up that far, but I imagine she made a pretty decent co-host, looking pretty and reading off the cue cards in a lively, duly enthusiastic tone. But that same tone doesn’t really translate to comedy, to The Daily Show, especially in her segments where she’s narrating to the viewer or prodding Jon Stewart’s straight man. A comedy performance needs to somehow communicate its absurdity to the audience, or otherwise we just get frustrated by the character’s inhuman stupidity, and that undercurrent is completely missing from Perfect Couples, leaving a contrived story with a mawkish, unearned ending.

Modern Family wrapped a whole A-plot around the Dunphy kids walking in on their parents doing it, but the somewhat clipped scene of the kids surprising their parents on their anniversary had a genuine set-up then a quick transition into the family’s immediate emotional shock manifesting itself in one of Modern Family‘s always well-done frenzies: Phil’s frustration, Alex washing out her eyes in futility, over-intrusive Claire retreating into her bed, Luke processing the confusion: “Whatever they were doing, I think Dad was winning.” It’s almost like Luke wrote the Perfect Couples scene: I understand that something’s being interrupted, but nobody’s panicking so it can’t be all that important. And if it’s not important, then what’s there to laugh over?

Ugh. I’m sure that actors love the Halloween trope — if you play dress-up for a living, why not take on an excuse to go all out. It’s not every day in the world of Modern Family that the cast can dress as Frankenstein’s monster or a crone or Sexy Mother Teresa. I’m sorry, Phil, did you have a professional make-up artist turn you into Frankenstein? Because most of the people on my block, at least the ones who get all costumed up, usually just slum something together from stuff collecting dust in the attic or some shit they picked up in the seasonal aisle at Wal-Mart.

But I loathe the Halloween trope, even more than the Christmas trope, which at least comes with its own baggage: commercialism versus spirituality, a season for familial love versus the detritus of distance and history that builds up through the rest of the year. Halloween is just an excuse for kids to get candy from their neighbors, and possibly worship Satan. It’s not a coming-together holiday, the type that made “My Funky Valentine” from last season so much easier to digest. Claire’s trademark put-upon rant at the end of the episode… I bet the writers thought it would show how well the family blends, that we’d focus on the once-homogenized Pritchetts these days assimilating Gloria’s Christmas traditions and the gays’ tandoori turkey for Thanksgiving. Or perhaps we’d hear how Claire values tradition, how she doesn’t want to lose the Dunphy family history. But really, she’s being — look at her costume — a shrill, nagging crone who, for twenty-four hours, resents the impositions that the modern family has saddled her with. She wants to control Halloween, like it’s the family room remote control. Maybe it was Claire’s sudden OCD, but there’s usually a bit more willing compromise with the character. She is, after all, married to Phil.

The ancillary plotlines, which together took up about half the episode, were classic Modern Family. There’s another brief set of mis-communications between Jay and Gloria, and Jay again forgot that he’s an old man with a hot young wife and remembered that he’s married to a Colombian immigrant whose first language isn’t English. This has been a hoot in the past — I suspect it would have been funnier this time if the joke weren’t just a long sequence of Gloria’s malapropisms.

The stars of the show were, again, the gays, and straitlaced Mitchell trying to fit into his new even-more straitlaced office by dressing up as old-school Spiderman, probably the most puerile, outdated costume that doesn’t have the words “Power Ranger” attached to it. And Mitch learns that he doesn’t work in one of those cool Dunder-Mifflin offices decorated with pumpkin cutouts and hanging skeletons and that insufferable cotton cobweb stuff. (And, since you asked, I certainly do have a problem with Mitchell being in the office on Halloween, which happens to be on a Sunday this year.) Ha ha ha, Mitchell never fits in!

I shouldn’t be sardonic, the character’s really well drawn and I love how he and Cam complement each others’ many neuroses and subsequent overreaching. This time, we started off slow, with Mitch just squeaking around the office, and the build-up was kind of abrupt, but the payoff — middle-aged dandy Spiderman climbing down a drainpipe, sneaking over to his car, then setting the alarm off was hilarious. And completely in character, too, even though I have this nagging feeling the writers pulled the same gag with Phil somewhere in season one.

And we’re back to the Dunphys’ Halloween house of cheesy suburban horror, and the way the scene sort of escalates but not really. I didn’t feel any real urgency towards the breakdown of Claire’s little staged Halloween scene — I didn’t even pick up on the incongruity of Gloria’s new Midwestern accent or realize that Jay was in charge of special effects. (Seriously, if the Dunphys put half as much time and money into getting that broken step fixed… and does Claire actually own a table with a head-hole cut into it? Why would someone own such a thing?) But Cam upstaging Mitchell’s immediate Halloween nightmare with his own extremely latent Halloween fail story was a great sight gag, and also another reminder of why Cameron’s the awesomest drama queen ever.

Okay, so next week, the gang goes all out for Election Day! Phil dresses up as a ballot! Luke (hopefully) runs into a wall!