As Todd pointed out in his What’s On Tonight write-up, this episode was a (perhaps unintentional) homage to “The Chinese Restaurant,” one of the best ever episodes of Seinfeld, where the gang goes to get food and never gets served because of a lot of elaborate mishaps. Stacked up against that episode, “Party Of Six” doesn’t hold up. But as a fun half-hour of Happy Endings, it wasn’t bad at all!
The joke between the two episodes is fundamentally different, anyway (I’m already regretting using the comparison as my lede). In Seinfeld, it’s that they can’t even get a table, and that waiting for tables takes so long and is so annoying. Here, it’s the (also classic) problem of everyone being unable to settle on a place for Penny’s birthday, spun into a whole episode.
It’s a thin concept, so quickly the reasons why the gang can’t go to places become more and more extreme—Brad and Jane had sex in several, Penny lost the rights to one in a break-up, and (my personal favorite) Alex has already eaten Thai, Indian and barbecue for lunch. Today. My one big issue with “Party Of Six” was that it had a lot of scenes where the gang said why they couldn’t go to restaurants while sitting around the table. Sure, we had some flashbacks and cutaways, but mostly it was everyone shooting places down for silly reasons, and the gag began to grate before too long.
Obviously, an episode like this is going to rely on crazy, rapid-fire dialogue between everyone and nonsensical joke upon nonsensical joke. Pretty much every Happy Endings is like this; there’s usually more plot, but not that much more. But I kept thinking there should be another element for everyone to play with—maybe they should have gone to more restaurants, or run into more ex-girlfriends, or whatever. I assume the episode had a limiting premise almost as a challenge to itself, and it mostly succeeded admirably—I like these characters, and I like watching them bounce silly jokes around. But it just wasn’t quite at classic level.
That’s enough about what I don’t like! Here’s what I did like! The Brad and Jane “twist” where he had a Mexican restaurant he would break up with girls at was a nice way to give us a brief glimpse of their pre-married lives and underline what it is about Jane that appeals to Brad so much. The whole thing was done with a touch of heart, but it wasn’t overly sappy and didn’t needlessly dominate the episode (lengthening their spat beyond five minutes would have just seemed silly).
Max’s increasing delirium as his hunger grew was great fun and gave Adam Pally a lot to play around with—Max is always heightened, but he tends to work well when he’s given a vague reason to be so heightened. As they finally get to a place that serves them bread, he stops halfway through a bonkers plan that may require Dave to quickly grow a mustache, realizing that his famishment was driving everything.