Playing House's Emma And Bruce: Frenemies In A Truce

One issue endemic to inferior and/or ill-conceived TV shows is when, for the sake of creating conflict, characters keep getting thrown in each other's paths who in real life would have long since cut one another out of their lives. (Not just scripted shows, either: fake interactions between people who only spend time together for contractual reasons are basically the entire foundation of the Real Housewives franchise.) Playing House starts with a character who cheats on his wife with an online butt enthusiast, making him an instant villain -- but the fact that his wife is pregnant at the time of his infidelity means that he will never be out of the picture. The ways Playing House continues to integrate Bruce into the action shows how carefully its creators have thought through the show -- like, in the latest episode, his storyline with Emma.

Other than a brief and swiftly regretted backslide in the pilot, Maggie has never entertained any notion of taking Bruce back, and the show has turned his character into quite the object lesson of why you don't take up with some skank from the internet: all his loser friends are incapable of taking him in; Emma eats all his fancy cheese; the only way he can make Maggie spend time with him is to mandate couples' counselling in their divorce mediation. The latest episode proves that he had even further to fall, as Emma discovers that he's been living in his and Emma's storage unit, subsisting on foods he can prepare using an iron. For all the obvious reasons, Emma still isn't a fan, but (a) she knows that if he's going to be a third parent Maggie's daughter, he'll need a place to live, and (b) she can use the couples' counselling requirement as leverage. She did, after all, become the best negotiator in all of Shanghai (and we should probably assume she got a very good price on that perfectly cut blazer).

But helping Bruce for pragmatic reasons doesn't mean that Emma has to be nice to him, and she...definitely isn't. She marches him over to his mother Mary Pat's house and engages Mary Pat in a discussion about Bruce's future -- first, by establishing that she and Mary Pat have plentiful common ground where Bruce is concerned.

Emma: I think we can all agree that Bruce here is a piece of garbage.
Mary Pat: Absolutely.
Bruce: Hey!
Emma: I mean, he's worse than garbage. You know what he is? You know what he is? He's raw sewage on a hot day.
Mary Pat: I think of him as a dirty melted snowman.
Emma: Absolutely! I'm loving that visual.

Emma even gets Mary Pat to agree that since Bruce, the human garbage, came out of Mary Pat, it means Mary Pat can't just leave him on the curb: "I don't mean to get all Giuliani on you, but you've got to get this garbage off the street!...You can't leave it out there to stink up the whole street! What will the neighbours think?" However, Mary Pat's offer -- rather generous, under the circumstances -- to let him live in her garage is rejected by the ungrateful Bruce ("There's spiders in there? Uncle Donnie died in there!"), and Emma has to take matters into her own hands. After an interlude in which she tries (and fails) to stop "Bosephus" from interfering in Zach's love life...

...Emma lends Bruce the money to get his own place, outfits it with all her furniture and accessories from China, and gets him to agree not to force Maggie into counselling after all. Mary Pat may be a negotiating opponent too formidable even for Emma, but a broken shell like Bruce is no problem -- but, make no mistake: everyone knows where they stand.

Emma: You know I still hate you, right?
Bruce: Oh, absolutely.

But now Maggie won't have to pretend to consider taking Bruce back in some therapist's office, and Emma's non-biological niece won't have to sleep in an arachnid-infested crime scene. And that's how you handle human garbage when you can't actually take it to a dump in another state.