Marry Me Is Happier Endings, And That's Okay

Last week's Hallowe'en episode of Marry Me featured a fun (and festive) surprise for fans of Happy Endings, the last collaboration between series creator David Caspe and star Casey Wilson: Dennah ran into her ex-boyfriend Derrick at a Hallowe'en costume party and rued the fact that she somehow never figured out that he's gay. In this week's episode, Jake and Annie recall their last bad first date-iversary, when Jake accidentally ate soy -- to which he's allergic -- and had to get an EpiPen stab by Annie; later, circumstances force him to admit that he's not actually allergic to soy at all. It's KIND OF like in the Season 2 premiere of Happy Endings, when Dave gets covered in shellfish, forgets to fake panic, and finally confesses that he's not really allergic, he just needed an excuse to get out of eating Alex's terrible paella. Is this proof that Caspe has so few ideas that he's had to reuse ideas from his last show? Maybe. And if so, I don't care.

I am not a crackpot. I just think more TV showrunners should use their next at-bats to revive what worked the last time around.

I hesitate to call Happy Endings a failure, not just because a network sitcom making it to the end of its third season after getting yanked around the schedule and burned off two at a time is pretty remarkable and rare, but because it was great the whole way through (though, full disclosure, when I watched the first couple of episodes, I was so turned off by Penny's character that I skipped the rest of Season 1 until returning in S2 helped me understand the satire in all her clichés). ABC cancelled the show in 2013, just in time for an overall ratings slide and a pretty lame season -- remember Last Resort, or Lucky 7, or Super Fun Night, or Back In The Game, or [insert every other show besides The Goldbergs, pretty much]? But just because ABC couldn't make the show a success by whatever measure still counts in 2014 doesn't mean it didn't work and doesn't deserve another chance.

Caspe did a very smart thing by setting Marry Me in Chicago, as Happy Endings was: it opens the door for tertiary characters to show up, since they live in the same world. It's even smarter to bring in Derrick, but put him in a scene in which Annie doesn't appear, so that there's no reason for him to comment on how much she reminds him of another bitch he knows who can never save the drama for Michelle Obama. Maybe Gil will get into a shady entrepreneurial scheme with Avi, or Daphne will show up as Kay's super-competitive and judgmental co-worker. Just because the whole cast of Happy Endings have booked new sitcom gigs doesn't mean the world has to be done with all the recurring weirdos.

After the insane success of Friends, creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman followed it up with...Veronica's Closet. Friends was a show about attractive young people who'd formed a surrogate urban family: what about that would have made anyone think its creators' next show should be a workplace comedy with, basically, a drag queen at its center? Happy Endings was about attractive young people, two of whom were in a successful relationship while two others had just broken up. Marry Me is basically the same, with fewer people in the core group and one ex pretty much totally out of the picture -- and if even those differences fall away the longer the show goes on, it'll be just fine with me. I am not a crackpot.