When a sitcom is clicking on all cylinders, it doesn't even need much of a concept to be funny, fresh, and inventive. A couple of timeless gag structures, a little commitment to timing and staging, and the energy of the participants is all it takes. This week's trifecta of album-titled episodes contains, arguably, only one truly memorable main plotline. But each one piles on the throwaway gags and makes perfect use of the office setting. Let's look at the delights that linger after each one in turn.
"Houses Of The Holy"
Okay, maybe David Cross's guest turn as Jimmy James' weird nephew Theo constitutes a second memorable main plotline. (The one I'm thinking about is below.) But really, it's not in how the situation is set up but in the skewed, resigned attitude that Cross takes to his only attractive quality: his magic. "Oh, wait, where did it go?" he announces while rolling his eyes after setting a $100 on fire. Adding to the enjoyment is the fact that Beth is all the way back after a couple of down episodes, flipping through the whole gamut of emotions in the space of twenty minutes while she falls in and out of love with Theo. And even while in the midst of each emotion — infatuation, disgust, weariness — she seems to be almost over it, on to the next one already. It's a highly idiosyncratic way to play the classic ditz, who usually is portrayed as someone wholly in the moment, and it makes for fascinating viewing.
Then there's the duct-taped-together coffee table in Dave's office that falls apart whenever Bill enters. (I love a sight gag.) And Beth and Lisa's girlfriends relationship (which will continue to provide a crucial foil during Lisa and Dave's breakup) gets established via that well-known bonding activity, eating peanut butter out of an industrial-size jar with plastic spoons. I'm not all that interested in the storyline where Bill puts Joe on the air, but it does allow Bill to dash through the office in fear when he hears Joe reading the news. We're approaching the season two pinnacle of the Newsradio shot — characters running into and/or out of a static frame — and Bill is warming us up.
"Physical Graffiti"
Stewart is back, and Dave has had it. When Lisa insists on continuing to talk to her ex-boyfriend on the phone, Dave engineers a showdown at a restaurant to try to give Stewart the message that the relationship is over. Meanwhile Bill and Catherine are being egged on by Joe in an escalating series of practical jokes that culminates with naked pictures of both on some newfangled mid-nineties invention called the Internet. Although the joys are largely around the edges of these stories, the big climax at the restaurant plays with a lot of emotion. Poor Dave fears the connection between Lisa and Stewart, and who hasn't been there — unable to compete with a long shared history of in-jokes and common acquaintances? When they won't tell him how he reminds them of Howie Maxfield, he guesses anxiously: "Was he deformed, disfigured in some way?" But he finally gets his dander up and confronts Lisa about her inability to commit.
Here's an episode more chock-full of out-of-nowhere jokes, emerging from the fringes of the main storylines. "What kind of man writes and records a song as a joke?" Dave demands angrily, only to be immediately answered by Matthew: "Weird Al Yankovic." (In this week's episodes, we find that Matthew is a Weird Al fan, an Archie comics reader, and a Disney animation fan. Yeah, they really had that character completely pegged.) When Bill complains that Catherine has forwarded his office phone to a salsa station, Dave answers the trivia question in a sudden burst of Spanish (with Bill's distracted assistance), then protests after Bill hangs up that they just won $94. And of course, Beth is in full form, trying to start catchphrases ("bitchcakes" and "bunnymaker") and making fun of Lisa's awkward reference to Dave as her lover ("how often do you make luuuuv with your luvvahhhh?").
"Led Zeppelin"
This is the one really strong A-story to which I referred above: Dave and Lisa communicating by memo after their breakup. Oh, the comic possibilities of Dave reading aloud from slips of paper! All the while, Jimmy James is sitting at the conference table in a headset, playing with executive desk toys and running through the 17 names left on his potential wife list. After Dave reads Lisa's first memo in response to his apparently predictable protest that the conceit is absurd ("absurd or not …"), he writes on it: "To Lisa from Dave, Re: Memos … screw … this!" only to be handed a memo in return: "Handwritten memos will not be accepted." Lisa's collection of memos prepared in advance for every situation has more than a whiff of Wile E. Coyote about it, and it's an endless source of happiness.