The funny stuff: School’s out forever!

This week, we had a bunch of new episodes, starting with

How I Met Your Mother: This episode was completely, utterly forgettable, save the last two minutes, where Lily went into labor.  I did have one funny line I wrote down though:

Lily, after telling the group Marshall’s been swaddling her in preparation for the baby: Swaddled is just like sleeping in a warm burrito. *happy face*

2 Broke Girls: Another rather forgettable episode, though it did push the plot along a bit as well, with Max quitting her nanny job so she could focus more on the cupcake business.  Again, I got one funny line I wrote down:

Max: Scaring people into participating isn’t success, it’s Scientology!

The Middle:  This episode was amusing, with the parents getting a new bed and headboard, but not assembly, and then completely failing on getting it together.  Once they finally did, they hated the headboard, and went back to their old one anyway.  The entire episode was framed with the ‘three main fights a couple has’ and then the rest as well, so that got a chuckle each time.  Sue, the daughter, decided she needed to ‘be the me I want to be tomorrow, today,’ and thus decided to change her name to Suki to stand out.  Of course, the school thought ‘Suki’ was some kind of bird flu, so that whole thing kind of petered out in the end, but Sue got her main goal: to be included in the yearbook, even if it was only in the In memoriam section.

Suburgatory: Suburgatory went for character development this week, with the dad attempting to have a relationship with his best friend’s surrogate, and Tessa throwing herself full force into her job at Dallas’ store, to the chagrin of George.  I  really though George was going to step in it, and offend Dallas by telling her that he didn’t want Tessa to end up like her, but he sidestepped by saying he wanted her to spend more family time.

Community:  Oh my.  This episode was crazy!  Riots in school, expellations, Dean in a can-can dress because the Bio class was (can) canned.  The framing device of the show was Starburn’s wake, and it started with Abed and Annie watching a video Starburns made in case of death. 

The show rolled on to the group coping with the death of a person they marginally knew, some in more grownup ways than others.  And of course, Britta trying to use her psych major to help, and failing miserably.  It was then the dean came in in his can-can dress, and told the group that they’d have to do summer school to get their bio credits, due to their professor quitting.

This led to the wake, where the group went on stage and rallied against Greendale, and we had some fantastic speeches to accompany that, from Annie’s ‘Our flag is an ANUS!’ to Shirley’s starting off calm, and getting increasingly frustrated.  The whole thing led to the riots, and Chang using them as an excuse to gain control of the school with his teenaged brute squad.

We then go to the group getting expelled, due to Chang running things, and them meeting up at Troy and Abed’s apartment.  Abed posits that they are in the worst timeline, but Troy brings them back, saying how it can’t be, since they are together.  Aww.

30 Rock:  This was one strange mama-jama.  They did it in the style of Tracy’s wife’s reality show, Queen of Jordan,  lampooning the genre pretty hard core.  There were a couple of funny moments, like the baby saying ‘Rude!’ but mostly it fell pretty flat.  None of the characters seemed like themselves, and there was no growth, and only one plot point moved forward, that being Avery coming home.

The Office: So Andy’s gonna do something with his new Big Red paper company, we just don’t know what.  My guess was he is going to sell it back to Dunder Mifflin with ownership rights.  That should be fun.  Other than that, this episode was pretty miss for me.  The humor just wasn’t there at all.

Parks and Rec: I love this show so much.  The characters are great, and fully realized people, and yet, they still manage to bring laughs just about every week.  Andy slow-mo pieing Jerry, the bus running over the memorial portrait after they realized it was a trap, Chris speeding past the bus on his bike.  This was a great episode to build to the election, now we just have to wait to find out who wins!  My bet is on Leslie, I’m guessing they want to give the show more options in terms of story, and a different section of government is just the ticket.