Heaven help me, I think Back To You is funny. Not fall down on the floor hyena-laugh funny, not Britney Spears comeback train wreck funny, not NY Mets preparing to bow out of the playoffs during the last week of the regular season funny, but funny. And, perhaps more scarily, I thought last night’s episode was actually almost clever.
They took a premise I have seen on television a hundred times before and actually did not follow the standard plot. Chuck Darling (Kelsey Grammer) gets a fish, which he promptly kills. He does not want co-anchor and mother of his child Kelly Carr (Patricia Heaton) to know the fish is dead, so he gets the news director, Ryan (Josh Gad) to go and buy him a new one. Now, at this point I am thinking to myself that he gets the new fish and Kelly looks at it and knows that it is not the original. We have all seen that one before, whether it is with a fish, a bird, a dog, or a parent, the old switcheroo failure plot. I sighed and figured that it was late in the evening and I could go to sleep, but I would let the show unspool, and see what happened. Well, I was hugely impressed to see that my fears were not realized. Kelly had no idea that the fish had been replaced, the show never got to that old standby plot, as Chuck killed new fish after new fish after new fish before Kelly could ever see any of them.
Not only were the ways in which the fish died funny – pouring coffee on one; dumping another into cold water, causing a deadly shock to the fish’s system; and, the coup de grace, death by electrocution, but to top it all off, Chuck heartlessly tosses each fish into the garbage under his desk. No ceremonial burial for these bad boys, no moment of mourning, no “aw shucks.” Sure, it all sounds perfectly ghastly, but I was incredibly pleased not to see the plot go saccharine and end up with some tra-la-la message. Death to the fishes, I say!
Speaking of the dead, apparently the old Dillons Restaurant in New York was awfully close to killing people. Between the green chicken wings, green and moldy burger patties and all other manner of disgusting thing (roaches and rats anyone?), I’m surprised that no one ever got sick. Well, thinking about it, no one seems to ever actually have eaten at the old restaurant and it is kind of hard to give people food poison if they won’t eat what you’re serving.
Article comments