Bad Parents
Season 1, Episode 4
Written by Kevin White
Directed by Jerry Ciccoritti
Synopsis: Johnny and Moira attempt to reconnect with their children; Alexis sees Mutt being intimate with Jocelyn; and Stevie tries to help David turn clothes into cash.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
After a couple of not-very-appealing episodes, ‘Bad Parents’ sees the show starting to turn a corner. There’s proper character development and some nicely gentle comedy, with no screaming fits or hysterics.
Johnny and Moira are concerned that they have become disconnected from their adult children. (Alexis has a middle name but neither of her parents, it seems, can remember what it is.) Johnny calls a family meeting where, in a misguided attempt to bring them all closer together, he tries the kind of ice-breaker that was apparently a hit at Rose Video management retreats. The meeting gets off to an unpromising start when Moira declares, ‘Sadly, most of the time, we have no interest in what’s going on with you.’ ‘No idea,’ Johnny hastily interrupts. ‘She means no idea...’
Alexis is obliged to enrol for community service as punishment for a previous DUI charge (she drove into the front of a Prada store on Rodeo Drive, mistaking it for the entrance to an indoor car park). Her task is to walk around town in a hi-vis vest picking up garbage – accompanied, it turns out, by none other than Mutt, whose name we actually get to hear in this episode for the first time. He’s also doing community service, in his case for some small-scale drug dealing (mainly selling weed to his old high-school teachers).
I’m going to go out on a limb here and admit that there’s a nagging problem I have with Mutt. He’s depicted as the taciturn, mysterious type, but Tim Rozon (who appears to have been cast primarily on the basis of looking good shirtless) never seems entirely comfortable in the role. Alexis is clearly intrigued by him, possibly even attracted to him, which I suppose is consistent with what we know about her previous poor choice of boyfriends. But between the stilted, monosyllabic dialogue that the writers have given Mutt, and Rozon’s lacklustre delivery of it, the character ends up being one-dimensional and, frankly, boring.
There’s an awkward misunderstanding that arises where Alexis spies Mutt emerging from his barn with Jocelyn, the two of them evidently sharing a very close and affectionate relationship. Alexis gleefully reports back to the family that Mutt has been ‘making out with the mayor’s wife’. Later, Johnny and Moira overhear Roland and Jocelyn having a heart-to-heart in the café. ‘You can see him as much as you want,’ says Roland. ‘Just don’t keep it a secret from me, OK?’
It transpires, of course, that Mutt is actually Roland and Jocelyn’s son. Roland’s disapproval of his son’s hippie lifestyle, coupled with Mutt’s lack of interest in continuing the family tradition of becoming mayor, means that he and Roland are estranged. ‘I know you love him,' says Roland, gently. ‘I love him too. But the kid’s an idiot.' This is a sweet side to Roland that we haven’t seen before, and adds a welcome touch of depth to the character.
With everything out in the open, the scene ends with Jocelyn complimenting Johnny and Moira on the great relationship they have with their kids, and asking how they do it. ‘Listening is so very important,’ Moira shoots back, without a trace of irony.
Meanwhile, instructed by Johnny to move his clothes out of his father’s closet, David enlists Stevie’s help in sorting them out. She suggests that he take some of them to a thrift shop, where they meet David’s latest nemesis. In both looks and demeanour, the stony-faced sales assistant Wayne could be a close relative of the grocery store supervisor from the previous episode.
With Wayne having failed to show any interest in taking David’s outlandish designer wear off his hands, Stevie comes up with a solution. She takes David to an unoccupied room at the motel where she offers to ‘take care of your stuff’. ‘You wanna have sex with me?’ David responds – the second time in the episode that this joke has been made, intentionally or not. Stevie quips that nobody has sex in this room unless they’re being paid for it; curiously, the bed has a livid red heart-shaped headboard and matching satin bedding, which suggests that she might not actually be joking. Her proposal is that David can use the room to store his clothes, with one condition: that she be allowed to wear any of them, whenever she likes. He agrees; and presumably, for the remainder of the series, this is where David’s seemingly endless parade of outfits comes from. For story continuity, it would have been good if we occasionally saw Stevie wearing some of them, but I don’t think we ever do.
Overall, an enjoyable episode, with some good jokes and nice linking of themes, especially around parent-child relationships. It’s good, too, to see the friendship between David and Stevie starting to solidify, their snarking at each other constantly leavened by the small smiles that appear at the corners of their mouths. These two have more in common than might at first have been apparent, and it’s a relationship that will become one of the emotional spines of the series as it progresses.
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Moira-ism: ‘Why must you be so constantly irksome?’
Fun fact: despite playing mother and son, the age difference between Jennifer Robertson and Tim Rozon is less than five years.
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Previous episode: Don’t Worry, It’s His Sister
Next episode: The Cabin