Sweet (And Sour) Jane
Time was, I used to think of my personality as splitting the difference between The Office's Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling) and 30 Rock's Liz Lemon (Tina Fey). But now that both those characters live on only in syndication, there is but one place on TV that I can go to see a fictional version of my true self reflected back to me, and that is Happy Endings, home of Jane Kerkovich-Williams (Eliza Coupe). And "Unsabotagable," the second of Friday's two episodes, gave her a showcase to really Jane it up, Jane-style.
The situation: Max (Adam Pally) has a chance encounter with Chase (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), the old roommate whose life Max basically ruined. Chase says he had plotted all sorts of ways to ruin Max's life in return, but discovered that Max's life is so terrible, there's nothing Chase could do to make it worse. Max resolves to prove Chase wrong and turn his life around, and Jane is, obviously, the only person he knows who has the wherewithal to make that happen for him.
Max's cry for help is Jane's high point in the episode -- much better, even, then getting the whole gang together for a laundry party. (Actually, the laundry party was a plot point where Jane and I diverge: I don't think I could handle sitting near people folding their clean laundry differently than I do, which is to say, wrong, but I digress.) Jane is as prepared for Project Max as she is for every possible turn her life might take: she has a chart at the ready, and gleefully pitches in by cutting the gum out of his hair, feeding him vegetables, hosing him down, and throwing his clothes in the garbage. And her efforts immediately bear fruit, as the now sharply dressed Max takes his now conscientious attitude toward personal hygiene to a job interview, where his newfound self-confidence helps him leapfrog the open bagger position and end up Assistant Manager. It's enough to make you think that if an actually functional person got to share a training montage with Jane, he or she would end up President.
If you've never seen Happy Endings...well, first of all, you're part of the reason the show is on the bubble and burning off episodes, two at a time, on FRIDAYS, so get on board. Secondly: this might just sound like some Monica Geller shit: in fact, there is a Season 2 episode of Friends in which Monica (Courteney Cox) takes on the challenge of helping Chandler (Matthew Perry) work out to lose a little weight he's gained. But Monica wouldn't pitch in just as gleefully had Chandler asked her to help him put on weight, whereas when Max starts to suspect that his string of successes have been engineered by Chase so that Max will have a life worth ruining, Jane co-stars with Max in a second montage: sticking new gum in his hair, shoveling cake into his mouth, throwing dirt at him, and digging his clothes out of the trash. Mission Unaccomplished! Jane triumphs again! And if Max has decided that getting back to his former state isn't bad enough, and that Jane also has to rob him of his health, and goads her with baseless insults (that she has fat ankles, her bundt cake is dry, and there have been occasions when she has been "woefully unprepared") into punching him in the face, he can't even stay mad at her: this exhibition of physical violence only makes her hotter -- even to him, and he's gay.
Though the episode is a great showcase of Jane's results-oriented approach to problem-solving, the episode doesn't feature much of Jane's other best character note -- her happy marriage to Brad (Damon Wayans Jr.), which consistently avoids sitcom clichés of marriage. Brad and Jane love each other, are goofy best friends who share embarrassing interests (see: couples' improv classes), and are still totally hot for each other. And though it would be easy to make Brad the victim of Jane's anal-retentiveness, but he loves it. And, let's face it, he benefits from having her run things, as all fortunate partners of very organized, driven people do. The downside is Jane accidentally slipping and calling Brad her bitch in front of all their friends. The upside is that when an as-seen-on-TV ab zapper he impulsively bought causes him to void his bowels in his pants, Jane just matter-of-factly calls for a trash bag. It's called balance. And if you think you're better at it than Jane, she will challenge you to a balance contest and destroy you.