There is nothing more terrifying than having your 10-year-old classmates meet one (or both) of your parents, and I know this from experience. I felt for poor Gracie Carr, who so obviously wanted both her bully and her mother to disappear from this class trip to the station. She was probably thinking that the only upside was not having to have class.If only Kelly and Chuck knew that they were probably just making the situation worse for their daughter by wanting to confront the bully, whether through a "conflict resolution" session or the terrifying way that Kelly ended up going about it. (I'm well out of elementary school, but if tomorrow Patricia Heaton said to me, "I will come into your room while you are sleeping and I will rip your head off," I would probably faint.) As soon as Xander Tucker gets over his fear of Kelly, he's going to start bullying Gracie sevenfold. Perhaps by then Chuck will no longer be blinded by Xander's gorgeous, divorced mother and will actually be able to...
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Is it 1994? I think it must be, because lately Tia Carrere is popping up everywhere — well, if not everywhere, at least on two shows I cover, and I only cover three, so if she shows up on Friday Night Lights, I know something's up. Between her hanging out with Larry David (cocreator of Seinfeld, coincidentally on in 1994) and Kelsey Grammer (Frasier, also on in 1994) in recent weeks, I just have to wonder if I've been witness to a time warp. She did a cute job tonight, playing a woman — not a hooker, apparently — who almost managed to seduce Chuck, so it's a shame she was rather underutilized.Of course, had she actually managed to "take a ride on the Chuck wagon," as Montana so delicately put it, we wouldn't have been able to see that Chuck is, at heart, a decent guy. Sure, he only took Ryan out to dinner to prove to Kelly that he didn't donate the rude gene to Gracie, and yes, he did repeatedly try to hurry up and ditch this dinner to be with Carrere's unnamed hottie...
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Well, I'll say one thing: This is the first time in recent memory I've heard the phrase, "Recorded in front of a live studio audience" outside of a 20-year-old rerun. In fact, it made me think I was too hard on last week's episode. It's a retro show in its own way, and perhaps I needed that jolt of perspective that Kelsey Grammer's little intro gave me.The newsroom of WURG certainly was all a-twitter this week. After Chuck overheard some network brass (who were in Pittsburgh for a program at Carnegie Mellon on "The changing face of network news") talking about how he's gone from one of the biggest markets in the country to being Kelly's sidekick — even going so far as to say, "I'd put a gun to my head" — Chuck decides to take the lead story for the day's news: A family that went missing while camping was finally found. To say he steals it out from under Kelly's nose wouldn't even be an overstatement, and he leaves her with the less enviable, "Building on fire!" headline....
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Clunk. That's the sound this episode made as it hit the air. You may be wondering how a show could make a physical clunk sound, but (and imagine some dramatic flare here) they found a way! It's almost as if after last week's great momentum, the powers that be decided that they didn't want to give us too much funny too fast, and so they churned out an awkwardly paced and plotted car boot of an episode.On the upside, Fred Willard's Marsh was on fire tonight, and doing his proprietary shtick that I've loved since Best in Show. From his opening where, after reporting that Jason Shaw, a Steeler, was dating a supermodel, and exclaiming, "Now that's one person I'd like to trade places with for three hours," only to insist on explaining that he meant he wanted to exchange the football player, and very emphatically not the supermodel, I knew he was back in fine form. In fact, Marsh and Gary's shared scenes were, to borrow a term, "the adorablest," of the episode. Gary's robotic delivery in r...
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An alternate title for this episode could have been, "One fish, two fish, overfed fish, fried fish." I doubt PETA will be particularly thrilled with the outcome of the story. Me? I just kind of want to go out for seafood. While the fish-as-child metaphor was not exactly subtle (or original — they did it on Frasier in the episode "Flour Child," leading to Niles' wonderful line, "After all, a real child would have cried before it burst into flames"), it did create an almost Stooge-like backdrop for what was actually a pretty heavy topic: Is it healthy to everyone involved for Gracie to spend time with Chuck? It's obvious they will, and luckily for her, small as she might be, Gracie won't fit in a coffee cup.The writers could have had no idea that a story about tasers would be so relevant when this episode was in development, so this was quite fortuitous timing. I'm glad there's a force out there bringing such screamingly funny physical comedy around once in a while, reminding us...
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