Bunheads: You wanna see something? (S1E11)

And Bunheads is back!

We’re reminded that Michelle maced the entire company at the Nutcracker performance, and left town, before we get right into learning how the girls have been over the summer.

Boo has been taking care of a myriad of children for some reason, and her mother is pregnant and on bedrest, earning Boo even more time with sticky children.  Oh, and apparently, ketchup is an appropriate sauce on English muffin pizzas, for those of you with Iron stomachs. 

Melanie has been watching her grandfather, and taking up three tables at the Oyster Bar all summer.  Since she has no other distinguishing characteristics, we don’t find out too much more from her through most of the show, beyond a mysterious package the girls have been passing around.

Ginny has also been uber busy, what with her mother in complete breakdown mode, and has essentially taken over the real estate business, though she is doing probably the worst job ever.  She and Melanie do finally exposit that the ballet school has been closed all summer, and they really don’t have anything else to do, so there is that.

Bunheads: The Nutcracker in Paradise(S1E10)

So here’s the review, only a week late!

We open to Fanny and Michelle discussing the dance Michelle choreographed for the Nutcracker, as they go into the dance studio to see it.  Michelle has found a ‘temp’ to fill in, and surprise!  It’s Sasha.  The evil rat mouse dance is made to look like some sort of boardroom, with Kent from SYTYCD(!) as the main mouse.  Fanny loves the dance, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

We cut to Fanny and Michelle having a nice conversation about the fundraiser Michelle is throwing later in the episode, and then Fanny drops a juicy tidbit:  she found a cabin for her and Michael in Montana, if Michelle wouldn’t mind taking over for a while.  Michelle gladly accepts, and then: SHE comes.

The ringer.  This girl can do ballet in her sleep, and is basically a robot.  Fanny forgot to cancel her after Sasha came back, and basically freaks out.  This girl is terrifying, and no one even knows her name.

We pan to the other girls, and they are busy passive-agressiveing the ringer. “Guess I should take up typing,” from Melanie, I think.

They walk into the room, and Michelle walks into the second coming of the cold war, as all of our main girls are in a fight, which Sasha eloquently disseminates to Michelle.  The whole Charlie/Carl debacle ends with an: ‘And I wish we were all lesbians.’   Michelle manages to be a grown-up for once, and gets the girls talking again.  She then sends Sasha down to ask Fanny about the ringer, and she goes in the most amusing way possible:  arms flung back, chest out, in the epitome of dancer-walk.

So anyway, dancer girl is creepy some more, and Fanny chucks the mean task of getting rid of the ringer to the one person who could handle it: Sasha. 

As Fanny hightails it out of the room, the ringer turns Sasha into her own personal barre, and you can just see Sasha shrinking bit by bit as the conversation goes on, until the ringer has practically made Sasha want to hand Clara to her.

We then cut to: fundraiser, where everyone is dressed in costumes, though it’s a bit weird, because they seem to come from about four different shows, very strange.  Boo is all depressed in her period attire, and Michelle tries to cheer her up, and convinces her to seeks reconciliation with Carl, who hates her due to the Charlie thing last week.  So Boo does the obvious thing, which is go to the microphone, and tell everyone in the room how stupid she was, and that she still really likes Carl.  It was very nearly a crash and burn, but got pulled back at the last minute.  Carl takes her apology, and they dance around to a cover of Rainbow Connection, and it’s super cute, of course.

We then find Fanny crabby, as she found out that Michael’s Montana dream was a solo thing, as he bought a piece of land there.  And then, everything goes to hell in a hand basket.  Melanie gets grossed out by Charlie’s gross friend, and as she’s leaving, spooks Ginny, who goes in for a kiss with Charlie, but manages to split his lip instead.  Michelle then tries to ‘help’ Fanny and Michael, by telling Michael Fanny’s plans.  Sasha runs into random worker, and that was it for her.  THEN, Michelle runs into Godot, and he starts kissing her.  She does not protest, as the whole of the bar watches on.

Fast cut to PISSED OFF Fanny.  The only two minority characters in the whole show are performing a dance, which Fanny declares the most boring dance EVA. We then move to Ginny discussing Charlie things with a girl we later learn is only twelve.  Fanny is now not impressed with another dance, and Ginny is discussing actually inappropriate things with the twelve year old as Charlie pulls up with another girl in his car.  So, no more need for Ginny to plan prom contingencies revolving around when/how/if she should say no to consummating the relationship, especially with that poor twelve year old.

And suddenly: performance.  Fanny is in some sort of suit, and Michelle has a massive bag of doom, since obviously nothing good is going to come of ‘pretty mace.’  Ginny and Melanie are mad at each other again, because apparently Charlie sucking giant monkey balls is Michelle’s fault, somehow? 

The ringer is creepy some more, and then we learn Melanie almost certainly dated her own cousin once.

And then: performance!  Fanny goes out, and give Sasha/Clara the nutcracker, and the dancing is really good…so of course, they go backstage, where Michelle manages to mace the entire troop with her mace, and there is much bumbling, falling, and mass chaos.  Boo and Carl are cute again, some more, and Michelle tries to fix it by indiscriminately spraying water everywhere.  And the ringer is creepy again, as usual.

We then move to the hospital, where everyone is miserable, as is to be expected.  Ginny and Melanie make up over a shared hatred of Charlie.  Sasha and Tyler Roman talk again, and it’s super boring.  So we cut to Michelle and Fanny discussing the maceing, and Fanny is uber pissed.  She revealed Michael left, and Michelle spills that she told Michael about Fanny’s plan, and that when things hit the fan for the second time in the episode.  Fanny basically says things have been wrong since Hubble died, and we cut to…

Michelle doing her audition dance again.  Sutton Foster’s broadway training really comes out, and the piece is fan-freaking-tastic.  She asks how she did, did they like it?, and out steps…

Hubble, who was thoroughly impressed.  Michelle isn’t surprised by him being there, and they talk about how Michelle was there to rock the boat, and they walk to the table in Fanny’s living room, filled with broken frogs, except four, and then our four main girls are dancing behind them in silhouette, with Michelle wondering if she would have stayed as quietly, but louder and louder, parents are yelling. 

Michelle wakes up and realizes what she has to do.  She purposefully walks out the door, to the hallway, where most of the girls are sitting, and the parents are yelling in the background.  Michelle continues out the hospital door, as the girls make a last ditch effort, standing on chairs and calling out ‘Oh Captain my Captain.’  Michelle has to remind them that the teacher leaves in the end anyway, as she tearfully walks out the door.

 

And that’s it for the summer season!  Bunheads has been picked up for at least eight more episodes, so I’ll have more from the girls in January!

Bunheads(S1E9)-No One Takes Khaleesi's Dragons!

Before we get into the recap proper, a quick video recap of the two missed episodes:

And now, the recap proper:

So we open on Michelle waiting in a line, which we soon discover is for coffee.  The barista had apparently been off winning contests instead of, you know, running a business, and thus that is the reason Michelle had yet to hear of him. 

Anyway, we get to the counter, and it’s KURT!  Looking fairly ridiculous in a goatee/soulpatch hybrid that makes it look like a caterpillar is trying to swallow his chin whole.  He’s a terribly pretentious barista, taking upwards of ten minutes to make one cup of coffee…even J. Arthur’s does better than that.

Now Michelle has her coffee place, and we can move on, because that seriously took like, five minutes of show time, and I am over the coffee guy already.

Sasha is still in her little rebellious thing, and has joined the cheer squad with their ugly orange uniforms and mediocrity to achieve uniformity.  Oh, the analogies I could pull if this were a political post…

Due to Sasha’s abrupt temper tantrum/storm off, Fanny has to find new leads for all her shows, and is running every single dancer ragged…for one lesson, and then Fanny disappears from the episode.

Boo is practicing with Carl on their Ginger Rogers/Fred Astair dance, until they find out that the supermarket opening it was for has been cancelled due to overzealous zoning technicalities.  Michelle can’t have this, and goes around tricking the entire town into coming to a town meeting(yes, they went there) in order to overturn the zoning decision.

Of course, Michelle, being Michelle, insults just about everyone in the room, and the supermarket stays closed down.  This is immediately followed by awkward sexual tension between Michelle and Oyster Bar Godot, which Michelle shoots down right away.  It was terribly creepy and gross, but they appear to be continuing it in the next episode, and I have to say, Godot is no Luke, that is for sure.

And then:  Boo and Carl kiss.  Carl, her too-sort dance partner that the other two have been teasing for the last two episodes.  Carl, that Boo likes, and then completely dissed when the other two came into the room and starting talking about Charlie, Boo’s former crush, and Ginny’s current crush.  Carl stalks out of the room when Boo goes on about how Ginny can’t date the guy she likes.  Present.  It was about as subtle as it sounds.

So, to end the episode, Michelle talks to Sasha, and tells her not to make a huge mistake, ie, quitting dance.  They then make fun of cheerleading again, some more. “Did they learn to jump in an incredibly short room?”

Finally, Michelle gets a coffee maker, as a gift sitting on her porch.  Why she couldn’t have gotten one herself earlier, and saved the trouble of the weird Sean Gunn character, we’ll never know.  But I think the show if finally getting around to what we expected from the first episode, which is really about five or six episodes too long.

Anyway, it was a fun episode, even if the story was very strange.  Next week, we have the summer finale, so hopefully we get some movement on the story front there.

Bunheads(S1E6)-Movie Truck

So, oh man.  This episode was all sorts of cray-cray.

So first, Michelle wakes up to a gaggle of girls in her backyard; the doors to the dance studio are locked.  She goes to Fanny’s kitchen to find her, and instead find the old bitty’s book club, plus Truly, who are discussing the smut which shall not be named. 

Anyway, Michelle first bags on Truly for not having any friends her own age, then asks where Fanny is.  Turns out, Fanny has gone on vacation!  And left Michelle in charge!  Of course, it happens to be Michelle’s birthday weekend.  “If you insist on dressing up like Cinderella with your tiara and tutu, do it at night, now you have a class to teach!”  “It was only once,” Michelle sputters as Fanny hangs up and goes back to her vacation.

And then, we have class for all of two seconds.

Of course, we then must go to after class, and the girls discussing the movie truck that is coming later that evening, and they makes plans to meet at horrible Sasha’s house, for some reason.

We then cut to Michelle inexplicably practicing on the inexplicable pole that Fanny has installed, when Michelle’s friend Talia comes in, all “Hi there Nomi Malone,” and right there is where I just lost it.  This episode was hilarious from then out.  I don’t know what the point was, I don’t know if any of this is going to have any bearing on future episodes, but this episode was amazingly funny, and now I see how AS-P had a job writing for Roseanne.

Anyway, other stuff happens, like Ginny’s no-longer redheaded boyfriend brings pick gift bags for the girls for their girls night, and Sasha’s parents are awful and yelly, and her dad is so gay, like, literally, and Boo is a sad puppy again, some more when Charlie, tall bunhead’s brother, uses her as a post-it note.

BUT.  Michelle and Talia wander about town, and Talia spots Truly’s store, and goes apeshit.  “It’s a Duck! On a DRESS!”  Talia manage to rope Truly into Michelle’s birthday madness, and it is glorious, even if Truly isn’t a drinker.  I mean, spitting back in to the communal bottle?  Ewww.  Anyway, so drinking, and woo-ing, and slutty dresses, and not narc-cool, just cool-cool, so they talk to the girls, and then drive to LA for the 24 hour cupcake machine, as you do.

And then, the girls get back to Sasha’s too late, and can’t get in without setting off the alarm, so they sleep outside until six in the morning, on Sasha’s mom’s (now broken) car.  And they get back in, and Sasha’s dad is having a mental breakdown on the couch, and Sasha can’t deal, so she goes up to him “I stayed out all night and wrecked Mom’s car,” and silently walks up the stairs. 

And just when you think it’s over…

EXTREME closeup of Sasha in exaggerated black eye makeup, dancing to Constantinople with two random girls(or possibly adults?  Not sure).  It’s a beautiful contemporary piece with some ballet thrown in, and we have no clue if it’s a dream sequence or what, though the lack of anyone at all in the studio indicates dream, and then, we’re done.

This was another very weird episode, but I think I can see the forest through the trees… I’m not one hundred percent, but I think they are trying for a slow build, so we are seeing the gestation of a Michelle/Truly friendship, a Fanny/Michelle mentorship, and the girls are showcasing their before personalities, so they have somewhere to grow.  The only problem is, I’m not sure if we are going to have this show long enough for this gestation to come to fruition.  Only time will tell, so until next week…

Bunheads: Money for Nothing(S1E5)

This episode was kind of low on action, but very heavy on character development, and actually had some lines that I wrote down as I was watching.

So we start with Michelle freaking out over a opossum in her bed.  How did it get there?  How did she get it out?  Was it as trained as it looked?  The world may never know, since it wasn’t brought up again after the open.

We then find out it’s bill paying season in Fanny’s little made up “How to run a successful  business” world.  Fanny explains she pays her bills twice a year by sorting them into four piles: have to pay, should pay, may pay, and pay if there is any money left over.

Michelle asks Truly if this is her method for bill paying: “Mine is when the bill comes in,” she replies, “but Fanny’s system works too!”

We are then thrust into the main arc of this episode, Michelle trying to get Fanny to run her dance school in a way that won’t drown everyone in debt.  It is from this we discover that of the 75 students in Fanny’s school, nine are paying full price.

Michelle decides to fix that little problem by completely borking everything up.  She essentially yells at all the parents to start paying, and nearly kills the Spring festival dance recital, which ends up being off the wall bonkers, and almost awesome.

She eventually gets most of the parents to relent in letting their children perform, mostly assuring them she will be staying far away.  That makes it all the more surprising when Fanny tries to get Michelle to teach at the school(Fanny must have not been privy to the restraining order requests), though Michelle adamantly denys her ability to teach and/or connect with children...

…As she completely 100% connects with our four main girls.

Speaking of which, Boo gets a job at the Oyster Bar, and there is a cute boy with a ridiculous name that I can’t even remember.   The other three girls spend their time trying to woo said boy, with Sasha, aka the bitchy one, running point.  She fails miserably, and is then surprised when Boo manages to catch the boy’s attention.

So yeah.  This episode was a bit strange.  The character development I mentioned earlier did occur, but it was not even that much.  I really hope the show gets to it’s conceit here quickly, because five episodes in, and we’re not there yet.  Even Gilmore Girls, with all it’s rambling, had Rory at Chilton in the first episode.

Bunheads: Better Luck Next Year!(S1E4)

So, kind of a lot happened this week.

Michelle, who has now been in Paradise about a month, receives all her crap from Las Vegas, and a bunch of crap that isn’t hers.  This sets the narrative of this episode in motion, of Michelle putting her life back together.

The Joffrey summer program auditions are upon us, and Fanny is going only slightly less crazy as she did when she was planning the memorial service for Hubble.  There are men around fixing up the dance studio, and then…it happens.  A fax comes, and Joffrey has said, without really saying, that due to the condition of the dance floor, the auditions will have to be held in Ojai.

Bunheads(S1E3): Inherit the Wind

So we jump right in this week to Fanny and Michelle discussing with Hubble’s lawyer friend the details of Michelle inheriting everything.

Fanny basically passive-aggressively guilts Michelle through the whole episode, making sure it was ‘legal’ for her to use all the different things in the house.  It got kind of old after a whole, I really hope Michelle turns a bit more assertive as the series goes on.  As it was, Michelle kind of half-heartedly tried to assuage Fanny from going into her little tirades, but never succeeded in stopping her once.  Fanny went into a right tizzy when one of the ballet girl’s mothers came over to basically scare Michelle into selling the house, due to all the work she’d have to put into it.

We did, though, get to have a tour of the acreage, and boy was there a lot.  There were lakes, a river, tons of structures, and just as many problems.  After Michelle had about enough, she found Hubble’s meticulously restored convertible, and takes it for a ride.

Of course, she breaks it, and pulls off to get a tow.  And of course, when the tow guys gets there, they have a clusterfarg due to her turning into a private driveway, and thus, he can’t tow the car until it is off the private drive, unless he has permission to be on there.  Michelle goes up to the top of the exceptionally long driveway, and meets Bill, who really isn’t Bill, but I can’t remember his name…though Bill is what everyone in town knows him as, so I think I’m safe.

Anyway, gorgeous house, nice guy, blah blah blah.  Michelle and he banter for a while until he lets her know he has a date coming, so not awkward at all to have another woman in his house, could you leave now?

She does, and finally has the guts to let Fanny know how things are going to work, namely, that Michelle is going to stay in the guest house, which is terribly whimsical, what with it’s bathtub in the middle of the floor.

In other town news, Ginny, the short blond bunhead, has the real estate mom, who is a bit overbearing, but nice enough, Boo’s mom is like Sookie 2.0, and Sasha’s mom is a cold bitch.  Oh, and Boo has another characteristic come up: she’s a good friend, even if Sasha totally takes it the wrong way.

I’m still enjoying this show, but I’m kind of worried it’s because I can see the Gilmore Girls skeleton in it, and not on it’s own merits.  Definitely going to keep watching, because I think it can pull out into good for it’s own sake, I’m just hoping other people feel the same.

Bunheads:For Fanny(S1E2)

So this week on Bunheads, we jump right in where we left off:  Hubble has died, and now what? 

Fanny almost immediately begins freaking out, and starts planning a memorial for him.  It starts small, but as the episode progresses, it gets bigger and bigger until finally the plan is to rent the Intrepid(an aircraft carrier) and hold it there with 500 of Hubble’s closest friends.  So, yeah.  Off the deep end went that one, for sure.

Truly has a minor freakout as well, though she is not actually in a lot of the episode.  She basically takes over as Fanny’s surrogate daughter, and cleans the house, and organizes things, and generally is rather rude to Michelle.

Michelle, for her part, wanders around aimlessly, seeing as she had only been in town for all of a day.  She possibly steals a dog, finds a surfer bar, and finally figures out what to do: help the girls show their support of Fanny.

The girls, to back up a bit, decide to use Hubble’s death as an excuse to ditch school, and catch a movie, over Boo’s rather loud objections.  Their personalities are starting to come into focus:  Sasha’s the bitchy one, Boo’s the sensitive one, long brown hair girl is the slightly ditzy one, and Ginny is the snarky one.  I really hope they become more than one note characters, but we shall see.  They eventually take on the tutelage of Michelle, who helps them put together a dance number with the rest of their class to show their support of Fanny.

And then, we have our big reveal of the episode:  Hubble has signed over all his will…things and whatnot to Michelle.  He has left everything to her.  Fanny is not pleased.

So, this show.  It’s definitely a successor to Gilmore Girls.  Is it a good successor to Gilmore Girls?  Time will tell.  I really enjoyed this episode, though you can really tell it’s still trying to find it’s style.  It’s a fun little diversion, and I hope it gets to continue on.