Donna's off in Denmark at a conference right now, so I'll be with you tonight to talk Sunny. Here's what I know about Denmark: Carl Dreyer, Lars Von Trier, those tasty cream-cheese-filled pastries, and–just a guess here–that there's nobody in the whole country as awful as the proprietors of Paddy's Pub.
Or at least that's the premise–Denmark aside–of tonight's episode, an exceedingly slight bit of escalating farce that felt like the kind of "Let's just start the ball rolling and see where it lands" exercise that the Sunny gang would've trotted out in Season One. And I mean early in Season One. Because I like spending time with Sunny's core four–and because they've become a tight ensemble over the past few years–"Paddy's Pub: The Worst Bar In Philadelphia" was an entertaining enough 22 minutes, and occasionally even laugh-out-loud funny. But for the most part, the episode was as thin as the bar's new flat-screen TV.
Let's start with that TV, just as the episode does. Purchased to class up the bar, the new flat screen instead looks out of place, and though Dennis would like to point to the TV–and the new Blu-Ray player, which Mac is perfectly happy to let dangle loosely from the set, lest it clash with the TV's narrowness–as proof that they're not white trash at Paddy's Pub, and that you won't get stabbed If you drink at Paddy's, and that if you ask the surly waitress for a chardonnay, she's won't bark, "Do you want me to bring you some lipstick with that?"
Unfortunately, a local critic (played by Fisher Stevens, largely underused here) has just published a review that pretty much counters everything Dennis is trying to project. So what choice do they have? Charlie grabs his hammer, and soon Stevens finds himself duct-taped to a rolling chair, while the gang demands that he write a better review.