In the last few years, there’s been a positive trend of long-running sitcoms going into their last season with the knowledge that it is their last season, and taking that knowledge to end the show definitively. 30 Rock, The Office, and Parks And Recreation all ended their runs with seasons that tied up whatever loose ends were remaining, and gave the impression that a phase of these characters’ lives had ended at the same time the audience stopped watching them. Not coincidentally, that ability to develop an endgame meant those shows ended on some of their highest notes, delivering remarkable emotional beats and paying off years of investment in these worlds.
Cougar Town, which also knew this would be its last season after years of being the quintessential bubble show, largely steered away from that trend. Season six of Cougar Town has been of a piece with the bulk of the show’s TBS run, where the sensation is everyone involved is so happy at their second chance at life that they’ve decided not to upset the wine cart too much. There have been some further changes to the show’s equilibrium since the Bobby swap in “Full Grown Boy”—Travis finding a career with the creation of the Winebulance, Andy and Ellie realizing they’d be happiest trading the work and home roles—but for the most part Cougar Town has felt like the same show, the actors and writers coasting on their breezy chemistry. (A chemistry that frequently struggled without one of its key elements this year, as it never completely filled the huge Bobby-sized hole left with Brian Van Holt’s departure.)
But asking Cougar Town to change too heavily is asking it to change what made the show so good in the first place. Cougar Town grew very quickly from its early conception of being a show about a woman trying to reinvent herself at 40 to being a show about the friendship of this eccentric group of people and the wacky things they’d do to keep themselves entertained. Its vibe quickly came to match that of the wine that the Cul-de-Sac Crew drank as easily as water, a casual energy capable of extreme silliness and heartfelt moments at the same time. While every character has come a long way since the events of the first season—marriages, careers, children—the core elements always stayed true. Jules’s affection bordering on obsession, Ellie’s scathing wit, Laurie’s ebullient zest for life, Bobby and Andy’s dopey eternal love, Grayson and Travis’s patient weariness with everything. Cougar Town received the rare gift of being a show where the people making and watching it loved the same things about it, and never lost sight of that wonderful core.
This decision to avoid major changes initially makes two-thirds of “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” feel like the show is scrambling to reach some sort of new conclusion, as Jules is bombarded by elements of change all around her. Ellie declares that Stan needs to go to a better school, which would require her and Andy to move ten minutes away; Travis and Laurie have a potential investor located up in South Carolina; and Chick’s looking to take a long trip with his unfortunately named cousin Pootie. All of these moves happen within 12 hours of each other, and on the same day as Jules’s birthday, meaning she’s getting heartfelt goodbyes rather than her ideal presents. (She’s seen a baby tiger, she knows they exist.) It’s so distressing to watch there’s almost the worry that the show’s going to go the distance and pull a spectacularly cruel meta twist, going to its misguided beginnings as a grieving Jules goes to a bar to pick up a guy half her age.
Nope. Surprise! Turns out that Grayson orchestrated the whole thing as a way to fulfill Jules’s twisted birthday wish to attend her own funeral, in order to hear everyone say exactly what they thought of her. On the surface—and to any first-time viewer—this is a horribly mean thing to do to a person, toying with their emotions for sole purpose of a potential payoff. But for this group, it makes perfect sense. Think back to Grayson’s actions in the season three premiere “Ain’t Love Strange,” where he used an elaborate prank to engineer Jules’ idealized proposal setting and created arguably the show’s greatest emotional beat. The Cul-de-Sac Crew knows both that these extremes are the best way to get through all of Jules’s tics and obsessive qualities, and more importantly know that their love for each other is so strong they can get away with going to such lengths.
It’s also saved by the fact that the emotional moments both before and after the reveal are perfect. Series creators Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel returned to write the finale along with longtime writer/executive producer Black McCormick, and their natural talent and understanding of the characters lets them tug the heartstrings expertly. Jules Cobb hasn’t been as well-served this season as in prior ones—the tendency of long-running shows to exaggerate existing traits took her to a point where she’d never finished a book in her life—but she’s the rock of both the crew and the series, and Courtney Cox delivers her best work all season in reacting to these emotional upheavals. (Cox also directed the episode, which is well-framed and well-paced in the way we’ve come to expect from her various stints behind the camera.) Everyone else is on a similar level, particularly Josh Hopkins and Christa Miller as these incredibly guarded characters drop these guards for a few brief moments.
And as you’d expect from a Lawrence/Biegel script, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” also manages to be spectacularly funny. I laughed harder and harder every time the recurring joke of “What?” every time someone says something inappropriate came up, particularly when the group responds to Chick talking about condoms or weed. (As valuable as Ken Jenkins was to this show on an emotional scale, it’s for the best that the final season steered largely away from the consequences of Alzheimer’s and made sure he was there physically and mentally at the very end.) And while it’s only a return via video chat—or “virtual hillbilly app” as Tom’s girlfriend interprets it—having Van Holt back is a joyous occasion that brings back Bobby’s sorely missed trademark energy, misinterpretations of how the world works (“J-Bird! Your house is moving!”) and the unconditional love Andy feels for his other half. While it’s faded in viewer awareness since it jumped networks, this could be one of the funniest shows on TV when it was at its prime, and the familiar flow of jokes is a welcome reminder of that truth.