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Loot (S2, E6-10)
WHAT HAPPENED
In the back half of the season, Loot manages to go to some expected and wholly unexpected places. Let’s start with the obvious stuff such as the simmering romance between Molly Wells (Maya Rudolph) and her accountant at the Well Foundation, Arthur, played by Nat Faxon who may be dorky and Excel spreadsheet-loving but who like someone out of a homoerotic office fantasy rocks a hot, smoking bod’. Ripped though he may be, there’s a deeper, more meaningful connection between the pair who bond over all kinds of things; for Molly he’s the lovely, normal guy she’s also wanted to be with, and now freed from her need to be wealthy – she still likes its trappings though and who can blame her? – and for status, she wants all the normalcy that Arthur offers. Except ———- SPOILER AHEAD !!!!! ———- naturally in this rom-com thread of the show, Arthur ends up with gorgeous Aussie model Willa (Hayley Magnus) who isn’t just a narrative fill-in but someone Arthur actually loves. Oh no! Things come to a head in the final episode of the season when Molly decides to go to Arthur’s house and ———- SPOILER AHEAD !!!!! ———- kiss him only to find Willa is there. Fluffy romantic dreams ended, she orders her co-dependently close assistant – their exchanges are hilarious, full of outrageously wrong ideas that seem perfectly normal in the hyper-billionaire world Molly has yet to extract herself from – Nicholas (Joel Kim Booster) to take her ANYWHERE on her private plane and that ends that. Well, of course, it doesn’t you cliffhanger-naive fool, but it does set things up nicely for a hoped-for season three. Meanwhile, Molly’s cousin Howard (Ron Funches) gets his dream of being a wrestling promoter realised, Ainsley and Rhonda (Stephanie Styles and Meagen Fay), the two minor office members of the group get giddily chirpier, and more demented and darker respectively and Sofia (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez), while still a Type-A queen, finds love and a good deal of emotionally-freeing self-realisation as she steers the Wells Foundation to actually those hotels for the homeless she so fervently believes in.
THE VERDICT
Loot is one of those modern sitcoms that sets out to be hugely, impressively funny and which actually achieves it. It knocks it out of the park with fully-rounded characters – well for the most part; Ainsley and Rhonda are barely beyond cardboard cutouts but good lord, they are hilarious for all that – stories with some emotional grunt (Molly discovering that her fellow billionaires are all part of some dark, near-satanic wealth retention cabal just about destroys her; its a fantastically realised parody of billionaire culture and the 1% debate that not only makes a point but rips Molly a new nasty gash of vulnerability) and a way with oneliners that’s just a gift. Sure, it’s pretty much business as usual workplace sitcom-wise but the writers absolutely make the most of it, delivering up dialogue so funny and situations so absurdly silly that it’s hard not to laugh out loud in almost every scene. The second season does a nice change of advancing characters and plotlines while keeping the core absurdity of the premise gloriously and happily in place and you can only hope AppleTV+ are even now signing on the dotted line for a third season.
Loot streams on AppleTV+
Not Dead Yet (S2, E6-10)
WHAT HAPPENED
The back half of Not Dead Yet does not exactly reinvent the wheel but there are fun developments all the same. In a sitcom which keeps things light and breezy and network-TV light for the most part, The SoCal Independent, the newspaper where this comedy is situated, comes up for sale and while its owner Duncan Rhodes (Brad Garrett who has a ball in the role) sees it just another asset to be offloaded for a profit, everyone else sees it as a home of sorts, including his daughter Lexi (Lauren Ash) who grows throughout these episodes to be one of the gang and a friends to series’ protagonist Nell Serrano (Gina Rodriguez). Granted the sale isn’t exactly tense and is played for laughs, understandably, more than anything, but it’s enough of a major plot point for everyone to draw together and realise that what matters is each other. Not Dead Yet also gets its rom-com on in the back half of the season with Lexi going from f**k buddy to girlfriend with Nell’s autistic housemate, Edward (Rick Glassman) and the pair finally coming clean to Nell. She, of course, is horrified by the fact that her boss and her roomie are having LOTS of bedroom fun but that’s eventually resolved after giving Rodriguez the chance to do some lovely slapstick acting as she tries to dodge Lexi in the office. Meanwhile, Nell herself might have a shot at love with sports journalist TJ (Jesse Garcia) but as is the way with sitcoms and their protagonists that love cannot last and by season end, Nell is alone again, as is her bestie Sam (Hannah Simone) who leaves her husband for a life unencumbered by a dead and dying marriage. It all ends happily of course because that’s the sort of twenty-minutes and sorted traditional sitcom that Not Dead Yet is, but that’s no bad thing, especially since Nell is still seeing the ghosts of the people whose obituaries she’s writing and learning sage life lessons along the way.
THE VERDICT
Look, let’s be honest, Not Dead Yet is not in the top tier of sitcoms and won’t sweep the Emmys anytime soon. BUT, and this matters in a cold, cruel world where everything seems a little fascist and nasty at the moment, it gives you twenty minute bursts of family and belonging and light narrative dilemmas and anxieties that get neatly stitched up by episode’s end. And while the show does not a character arc dislike, carrying things like Nell and TJ’s romance and Lexi and Edward’s oddball antics along for the ride across successive episodes, it really isn’t the sort of show to build and build to a crescendo of a narrative, and that is more than okay precisely because it gives us laughs, characters we love and a sense of family and community. That might seem like a strange thing to expect from a sitcom but we watch them not just because they’re funny but because they give us a place to belong for a time, with people we like (or don’t but in most sitcoms the Big Bads aren’t too awful) and make us laugh just when life feels a tad too bleak for our liking. Not Dead Yet may not win all the awards, but it is well written, sparkling in its own way and gleefully absurd and it delivers on everything we want from a sitcom in light and amusing but emotionally satisfying ways.
Not Dead Yet streams on Disney+
Big Door Prize (S2, E5-10)
WHAT HAPPENED
Way out the wackier end of the sitcom spectrum – to be fair, The Big Door Prize is more dramedy than sitcom but it does have its comedically situational moments – the final six episodes of the second season saw some big changes in the way each of the characters are dealing with the fallout from the MORPHO revelations. In case you haven’t seen the show, in season one, a strange blue glowing machine just appears in the town’s general store run by the now existentially-liberated Mr. Johnson (Patrick Kerr) which gave each member of the town of Deerfield a potential occupation or calling ranging from superstar to guide and on and on. It definitely set the cat among the pigeons and while a fearsomely troubling number of people set aside self choice for this weird form of semi-spiritual guidance and created a suite of problems for themselves, it also laid open dynamics in relationships already there. Chief among them is the marriage between the show’s main ensemble character, Dusty (Chris O’Dowd) and Cass (Gabrielle Dennis) from which both have given themselves a break while they try to work out if they still belong together. It’s a strange arrangement with Dusty and Cass still sharing the family house which their daughter Trina (Djouliet Amara), who all loved up and then not with Jacob (Sammy Fourlas) as the episodes progress, and Dusty getting close and then not and the maybe close again to fellow teacher Alice (Justine Lupe), and by season’s end ———- SPOILER AHEAD !!!!! ———- their relationship has busted wide open. Cass also severs her troubled relationship with her mother, and town mayor, Izzy (Crystal R. Fox) while playfully tragic town restaurateur Giorgio (Josh Segarra) finds himself shacked up with Nat (Mary Holland) in super quick time, generating a great deal of the show’s comic richness. Love finds Father Reuben (Damon Gupton) and Hana (Ally Maki), and even Izzy, and it seems like things might be coming to all kinds of unexpected happy endings by season’s end. But then Dusty ———- SPOILER AHEAD !!!!! ———- caught between the emotional tumult of the end of his marriage but his estrangement from Alice, pushes one too many buttons on the MORPHO with the final episode ending with him in a very strange otherworldly room indeed.
THE VERDICT
While The Big Door Prize prefers slow burn reveals to massively striking sudden revelations, it manages in the course of these six episodes to absolutely rewrite the fabric of a town already being transformed by the absolute challenging of the status quo. It’s that blend of big changed in small nuanced storytelling that really works for it, and while it does get a bit soapy and sudsy at times, it keeps its eye for the most on the emotionally authentic ball and delivers some fairly major engaging changes. Izzy finally chooses love over duty (and the adulation she imagines that brings), Dusty and Cass kiss their stake marriage goodbye, Jacob and his dad dad Beau (Aaron Roman Weiner) bond finally and love finally finds all kinds of people. There are a lot of loose ends tided up which is satisfying but enough uncertainty left to fuel a third season which looks to be going to be some very strange places indeed which in the show of this kind can only be a good thing. It’s interesting to note that Dusty has gone from being the chief sceptic to the one who initiates the next big stage of what the MORPHO might offer and he will no doubt continue his role as the heart and soul of the show if it is gifted with a third season.
The Big Door Prize streams on AppleTV+