Great Minds Think Different

“My Boys” season 3: proof that a TV series can, in fact, turn itself around and become good. (Scrubs season 8 may qualify as such proof too.)

The key difference that I can see is that the humor has stopped coming from forced witty banter but instead from putting some characters together in a room with a little bit of absurdity and then just letting their personalities bounce off each other. They’ve stopped trying so hard, and the show’s immensely improved for it. These two episodes made me laugh. I laughed honest to God laughs. I can recall very few examples of me actually laughing at previous episodes (which is pretty sad, considering the damn show’s a comedy).

Jordana Spiro’s strength on “My Boys” has always been her reactions to the antics of the rest of the characters, as well as her take on PJ’s own social ineptitude. In this new hands-off approach to humor, this type of acting flourishes. And she has other talents. When PJ and Bobby were having their talk in the coffee shop, and they concluded they were in fact dating, she let out a tiny little squeak that was so perfect I was in fits of laughter for a minute and had to pause to recover. I’ve already remarked on her facial expression skills (somewhere in the middle of a rather pessimistic review that almost no longer applies).

The damned baseball metaphors have stopped, thankfully. In the second episode we were treated to a rather cliché metaphor about a pebble dropped in a pond, but it’s all right since the voiceovers were limited to a couple near the beginning and one at the very end.

For a show that is ostensibly a slice-of-life sort of show, the writers are surprisingly willing to inject a little more absurdity than normal life actually holds. They must realize how much comedy potential this holds. First of all, Mike’s mustache is absurd. (Mustaches, much like farts, are inherently funny.) The old “My Boys” probably would have just had the other guys quipping about it endlessly. The new “My Boys” has Mike all proud of it and the other guys simply reacting to his ridiculous pronouncements like “another cop” completely naturally (rather than the sort of witty retort that real people could only have thought of about four hours too late). Then there was the great shot of the four guys with their shoes on their laps in Stephanie’s apartment. Out of nowhere, Mike says, “Is this heaven?” It’s not a quip, not a one-liner, just a guy voicing his thoughts. The whole show is so much easier to watch — and has settled down a nice distance away from being a generic 90s-style sitcom.

One thing that thankfully hasn’t changed is Andy. His role is and has always been to wander about and hover around, delivering wry comments on stuff (his own life as much as anything else). Of course that’s a bit of a sitcom cliché, but Jim Gaffigan’s delivery is so excellent that it works. At times (both in previous seasons and now), he engages in a bit of his own private absurdity. A memorable example from earlier is “You are the best cow. That’s why you’re gonna be the king of all the cows.” (Cows, like mustaches and farts, are inherently funny.) And here, he sits in the back of his own minivan while Mike bemoans Brendan not taking the stakeout seriously, ordering a pizza, not knowing his own license plate number while Kenny does, and saying “we’re just four guys, in a grey minivan, across from the grade school” without batting an eye.

I’m so encouraged by these new developments that I’m not even worried that they’ll run out of ideas now that PJ and Bobby are together. Just come up with some weird thing and toss it into the mix, and some comedy will probably result.