Where’s Greek’s Andylicious?

What a tease! How does a show add a great character, guest or no, and then just yank them out from under us as soon as we’ve grown to love them?

Unfortunately, I’m not sure that we’ll ever get an answer to the “Where’s Andy?” question. While I can’t find confirmation of it, I assume that McCartney‘s turn on Greek is done; Andy gets mad at Rusty over Jordan (why?), leaves the KT house, never to be seen again except on the other end of phone calls to Jordan and Calvin. Wonderful.

The truth is that the fuzziest end of that lollipop is that, while McCartney’s gone, he left Braddy (Jordan) behind. I have nothing against the actress, but the character sucks, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand what Rusty sees in her. Come on, dude! Polymer science geeks don’t have to have horrible taste in women!

Anyway, I realized something watching last night’s episode: it’s not necessarily that the show’s gotten bad, so much as it’s become boring.

I think I can discern a blueprint that Greek began using this season. Using last night as an example, each episode has given us an old relationship hitting bumps (Casey and Cappie), an old relationship gliding along (Ashleigh and Casey), a brand new relationship continuing to bud (Rusty and Jordan), and a what the hell relationship doing the sideshow dance (Rebecca and Evan).

But by doing so, the show’s missing a lot of targets; the stories in each episode are falling short, and the stories left out of a particular episode are getting the shaft. I absolutely don’t want to spend this season and beyond complaining about Greek, because I think the show overall is phenomenal; maybe this season isn’t as bad as I imagine, but rather, it’s just not meeting my expectations. Hard to say.

What I can say is that I was very relieved to see that Clark Duke was with us yet again. Three weeks in a row! Duke is mid-filming on a movie, so it is feasible that it’s been his schedule as opposed to the writers that’s kept him MIA. I do feel like we need more of him, but Dale is settling back into the healthy sidekick role that he developed from the start, so at least we can be thankful for that.

I was a bit surprised to hear that midterms have come to Cyprus-Rhodes already. Isn’t that finale territory? Because, otherwise, things are being sped up, which generally doesn’t make for happy times. The show could either be getting the ax sooner than they expected, or ABC Family could be pushing a major overhaul. Either way, I don’t like it.

I also feel more and more as if Calvin’s being phased out. Sure, he got screen time during Rebecca’s lesbian drama, but it feels almost as if the writers have forgotten how to let Rusty have two close friends. Calvin’s being used either as a means to someone else’s end (Evan, Andy), or as a non-entity, traveling around within the Dale/Rusty/Calvin group, escorting Dale away to allow Rusty and Jordan to have some time alone. What happened to the awesome Calvin that we saw in freshman year? At least that character had some depth of his own.

And what about Rusty? I don’t know about you, but he’s getting a little too creepy for me. I actually cringe every time he speaks to or about Jordan, and I keep on expecting him to start stalking her, calling her and hanging up, and leaving dead flowers on her doorstep. There’s unrequited love, and then there’s scary nut job, and something about the way that Rusty acts around, relates to, and discusses, Jordan, just gives me that really freaky vibe. Chill out, man.

Plus, now Rusty is Cappie’s guru? This week, Cappie got inadvertent life-lesson #2 from his little bro, another epiphany about his relationship with Casey. I could almost hear the voice-over with Cappie applying what Rusty was saying to himself, wheels grinding as his little bro continued to prattle on. Theirs is one of the great relationships on the show, but how about letting it be normal, and not infused with savant weirdness, or whatever?

Like I said before, maybe my expectations for Greek remain too high, but, certainly, this season is missing the mark set by seasons past. Hopefully the writers will turn things around by growing on the solid foundations that already exist, instead of constantly feeling as if they need to build more and more stories to keep us hooked.

You’re there already! Now keep the line taught!

Clacked by Aryeh S.
on May 26, 2009 @ 18:00 EST5EDT