(Guest Clacker Katie Schenkel comes at us again from movie website Just Plain Something, where she likes to walk the fine line between entertaining and informative.)
When It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is good, it’s really good. But it’s not always good. This week’s offering starts with Charlie telling Mac, “Your mom just burned her house down,” only to have the iconic black screen pop up with the episode’s title: “Mac’s Mom Burns her House Down.” I love when the Always Sunny’s episode title correlates to the last said sentence (the best example: “Charlie goes America over Everybody’s Asses”). It’s moments like this that make the show funny as hell. Unfortunately, that was probably the best part of this week’s episode.
The main focus is on Mac and Charlie trying to get their moms to live together. I was really looking forward to this episode, because both moms are played by great character actors (Pee-Wee Playhouse’s Lynne Marie Stewart and Napoleon Dynamite’s Sandy Martin). We’ve seen them together briefly during the 3rd season, but they didn’t interact much.
Unfortunately, the moms barely interact in this episode, either. We don’t even get to see them really confront each other, which could have been funny in itself. In the last five minutes of the show, they bond over their hatred of foreigners, and Mac’s mom fills the role of semi-abusive partner (the kind which we know from earlier storylines that Charlie’s mom craves). Maybe we’ll see more of this new relationship in later episodes, but it was a lackluster 22-some minutes of television.
There are a few funny moments in the A story, but they mostly come from Charlie and Mac, like when they start to sing the Golden Girls theme to inspire the women to become best friends. Any episode where Mac goes into nurturer mode with his mom is better for it, but I don’t think it was enough this time and jokes felt forced. Meeting Mac’s 20+-year-old zombie dog Poppins was one of the more successful parts of the episode (his eye keeps falling out and he eats a whole bottle of shampoo with no consequences), but I’m worried this was a one-time joke and they won’t bring poor Poppins back.
Then there’s the B story where Frank takes care of sick Dee, which also took too long to get to and really wasn’t very interesting. Dee has tickets to see Josh Groban, and while Artemis calls her about the wild backstage party going down, we don’t actually get to see him. When the singer was first mentioned at the beginning of the show, I anticipated a great, raunchy cameo considering Groban’s sardonic appearance on Glee last season. Needless to say, his absence was disappointing.
Like Mac’s beloved Poppins, the episode was patchy and left us with a mess. However, I have a feeling next week’s episode is going to be better. Not only is it the Halloween episode, but apparently Dee gets pregnant (a nice way to deal with Kaitlin Olson’s real-life pregnancy with costar and husband Rob McElhenney) and claims one of the guys is the father. Here’s hoping it isn’t Dennis (for the love of God, don’t let it be Dennis).
Clacked by Guest Clacker
on Oct 22, 2010 @ 11:00 EST5EDT
