One decent storyline in this one – Jay and Phil buying a car as a gift for Haley's birthday – but the rest was unimpressive. The fine acting from some of the cast doesn't save it.
The plot (a sitcom's second biggest strength, after glib repartee) was not tightly constructed, so it all ends up being less than hilarious.
I wrote a review of an earlier episode of here on IMDb. What I say below is a bit of a rehashing of the same thoughts.
First the good stuff: 1) They made Jay manly again, at least in the latest episode.
2) They made Phil less of joke. In the episodes 6 through 10 he's been a pretty nuanced, funny and interesting character.
3) In 6x09 (the previous one), they finally broke Alex out of her reclusion and gave her a shot at a relationship.
4) In another (6x07, I'm not sure), they - at long last - furnished Haley with a job.
5) On Halloween, they gave Mitch an ordeal to endure - and to make us laugh in the process.
Now the bad:
1) Claire keeps getting more caricature-ish as time progresses. Now her acting style is something out of a Three Stooges/Chaplin feature.
2) Gloria's accent is still out of control. I recently rewatched a few episodes from last year – in some of them, Gloria speaks a pretty smooth, pleasant English. What's the deal with this "loud, kooky gal from Colombia" brogue? (Listen to Vergara speak in 2014's "Chef").
3) Haley still has no sex life nor friends, but that doesn't stop everyone (including herself) from considering her "hot and popular".
4) After Haley had been hired several shows prior, no mention's been made of her job since.
5) Though Haley was kicked out of college for drunk misconduct, everyone at the party seems surprised she's no novice to alcohol. Even Mitch, who was her "lawyer" back at the college hearings.
6) In the very previous episode (last week), Alex finally woke up to her teenagehood and started to look for a relationship. Two consecutive guys interested in her show up, and both get referred to as "Alex's boyfriends" by the characters present. But a week later, Alex is alone and lonely again – boning up instead of getting boned (or a least smooched).
During the show's six years run, I honestly believe that more guys were shown interested in Alex than in Haley. What happened to all of them? The Italian boy at the pool as early as Season Two; the boy whose sports team was eavesdropping behind the door; the geeks who were in awe of Alex in the Uncle Cam's Truck Debacle episode; the guy at the university campus; the guy from the Crazy Neighbors family next door; two guys from last week's installment.
All these gentlemen appeared for exactly one episode each and were "never brought to mind" again. Did they all find Alex to be "not girlfriend material"? Did she, like, puke on them accidentally during a date? Or did she suddenly start eating insects while walking in a park? Why else would Alex get dumped so consistently?
A good solution to this issue would have been to make Alex wear braces. Why not? In the last few years, as many as 60% of American highschoolers wear braces. (It's insane, but it's true.) Braces effectively ruin any prettiness for as long as they're worn. Also add some terrible glasses, pad the cheeks a bit (Godfather-style) complete with the lisp, deck her out in stained, tattered sweatshirts and baggy corduroy pants. An ugly Alex with yellow teeth, dressed and behaving like Quasimodo, would have been a lot more justifiably undeserving of a boyfriend. (Note that I mean Quasimodo in the period-accurate attire, not the Disney version – because Alex occasionally dresses exactly like Disney's hunchback. Literally. The green sweater and all.)
But I'm guessing they just want to keep Alex's chastity until her 17th birthday arrives – that is, until February. Let's hope she'll not continue to be treated as a hapless nerd even after that.
7) Manny and Luke still have no girlfriends either, even though both have been interested in getting one for over a year now. What prevents them? Both are handsome, funny, resourceful, and involved in various girlfriend-friendly activities (musical theater and sports). True, Luke is a bit dumb and Manny is somewhat chunky, but then again, most girls are not Shelley Hennig either.
Why is Manny interested in Haley, but not in Alex - not even passingly? They're the same age, both supersmart, both stocky. Why not just pair up? I know it's opposites that attract, but still.
And boy, is America's suburbia rich or what! In a family of five, the only person earning an income is Phil, yet this money is enough to support a two-story house, raise three kids, buy three cars, and have enough left to be able to afford dining in restaurants, buy fitness-club memberships and all that. In the place where I live, you need to be a boss in charge of at least 50 people to have such salary, or be an intrepid embezzler, or a corrupt official taking huge bribes. There's certainly no way for a freelancer of any kind here to earn that amount of money legally, other than win a lottery, maybe, or get elected President. And I live not in some banana republic, but a G8 country. The Dunphies are rich.
But I guess we all remember an American sitcom wherein a shoe salesman also had a two-story house, in which he lived with an unemployed couch-potato wife and two nogoodnik kids (them getting employed only intermittently and mostly by mistake). What did they pay him in the shoe shop? I wonder who earns more – him or Phil?
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