A quick, blizzard-belated review of last night's "Cougar Town" coming up just as soon as I wow you with math skills while I stab you to death... Another funny, sloppy, weird, entertaining episode of "Cougar Town." I can't decide if the rambling nature of each episode is just a result of Bill Lawrence, Kevin Biegel and company deciding they'd rather pack in more jokes, narrative steadiness be damned, or if they're deliberately trying to make the show seem as chaotic as Jules' life, but it's really working for me. It's like everyone's involved in multiple stories at once, as opposed to off in their own sphere. Ellie, for instance, is pushing Andy at work (and then being unhappy with him about the Laurie thing), but she's also coming down hard on Grayson about his Christmas lights(*). Bobby's hooked into Andy's story (and teaching him the Confidence Dance) at the same time he and Jules are being a sneaky team to deal with Travis's need to be a teenager who does stupid stuff sometimes. And we can have lots of weird, TMI digressions about Andy's foot fetish, Grayson's hatred of manscaping and Bobby and Grayson being horrified to learn about the hair(s) growing out of Jules' c-section scar. And Laurie's relationship with Smith continues to be a great showcase for Busy Phillips, who keeps finding weird (and at times touching) new layers to Laurie.
(*) And the Christmas lights on Valentine's day was a really sweet, pretty moment, and reminded me oddly of JD running around with sparklers after Turk proposed to Carla.
Ratings haven't been great lately, at least compared to how "Modern Family" does right before it. ABC's already renewed it for next year, so that's not a big concern at the moment, but after a couple of people on Twitter asked me today if the show would do better with a different name, I wonder if they might be right. Lawrence says that the title helped get the show picked up in the first place because it was an attention-getter, but it's also a big turn-off to people who don't watch the show, and/or those who sampled it early when the title was much more apt than it is now. There's not a ton of precedent for a show retitling itself mid-stream, but as James Poniewozik pointed out, Ellen DeGeneres' ABC sitcom did start as "These Friends of Mine" before becoming "Ellen." So it can be done.
So the question is, should they try? And, if so, what might be more apt for what "Cougar Town" has turned itself into?
And what did everybody else think?
