This isn't fucking baseball, Weaselface, it's catering
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First Airdate: May 22, 2009
Written by John Enbom
Directed by Bryan Gordon
The final episode of Party Down season 1 is, naturally, a sea change for the series. In addition to throwing a wrench into the group dynamics at the core of the series, this episode gives us our last glimpse of Jennifer Coolidge's effervescent Bobbie St. Brown and our first introduction to semi-recurring character Uda Bengt, played by Kristen Bell. But more on both of them later.
This episode is one of the most focused farces the series has ever delivered, utilizing the end of the season's main character arcs to allow the storylines to crash into one another so hard that they're altered forever. While catering a gay Hollywood wedding that includes celebrity guest George Takei, the Party Down crew is thrown for a loop when Valhalla Catering (led by the fastidious taskmaster Uda Bengt) arrives, revealing that Party Down is merely the support staff and under no circumstances to step foot in the reception venue.
Ron has been at the crest of a major spiral since his high school reunion, and Uda's arrival has sent him straight to rock bottom. This isn't helpful, as today is the exact day that Henry realizes he might actually care about his job. Him stepping up to the plate is frustrating to Casey, who is at that same instant pulling away from the gig to focus on a potentially huge career opportunity. However, it's not exactly easy for him, considering that Ron is drunk, Bobbie is on mushrooms, and Roman and Kyle are only focused on finding their way into the party to rub elbows with celebrities.
The presence of an actually competent catering professional is the perfect catalyst for all of this mayhem, and Bell's performance as an uptight bully is one of the most thrilling of her career. She strips herself of all the inherent charm she usually imbues into her characters to deliver a villainous cartoon that is perfectly calibrated to take Ron down a peg, and the recurring gag of her ignoring the person she's with to listen to someone speaking on her headset only has the staying power it does because of her delicately clipped deliveries and perfectly unsettling physical performance.
Not to be outdone, Coolidge pulls out the stops even more here, allowing her character's drug storyline to push her typically off-kilter deliveries to the next level. There is a line about lemons here that I wouldn't hesitate to categorize as the single best line in the entire series.
While her material is essentially a weaponized collection of non-sequiturs, the more focused character material is also quite funny while also putting gas in the engine for the characters to end up in interesting places at the beginning of the second season. This episode really allows Ken Marino to let loose, turning his tightly wound character into a whirling dervish of chaos, which perfectly accentuates Scott's finely calibrated series of less and less halfhearted attempts to rein in the group and save the day.
Kyle and Roman, as usual, find themselves in less interesting places as characters, though Roman delivers a quite funny running gag after being given a particularly humiliating assignment. The episode might focus on the main characters, allowing the comedy to thrive in that dynamic, but everyone does get a chance to play as they say farewell to the show's first (and at the time penultimate) season.
Author's Note: While it has been very fun breaking down this series one episode at a time, season 2 and the upcoming season 3 will be reviewed in more of a capsule format, covering an entire season in a single post. Look forward to that, coming soon!
Rating: A
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
First Airdate: May 22, 2009
Written by John Enbom
Directed by Bryan Gordon
The final episode of Party Down season 1 is, naturally, a sea change for the series. In addition to throwing a wrench into the group dynamics at the core of the series, this episode gives us our last glimpse of Jennifer Coolidge's effervescent Bobbie St. Brown and our first introduction to semi-recurring character Uda Bengt, played by Kristen Bell. But more on both of them later.
This episode is one of the most focused farces the series has ever delivered, utilizing the end of the season's main character arcs to allow the storylines to crash into one another so hard that they're altered forever. While catering a gay Hollywood wedding that includes celebrity guest George Takei, the Party Down crew is thrown for a loop when Valhalla Catering (led by the fastidious taskmaster Uda Bengt) arrives, revealing that Party Down is merely the support staff and under no circumstances to step foot in the reception venue.
Ron has been at the crest of a major spiral since his high school reunion, and Uda's arrival has sent him straight to rock bottom. This isn't helpful, as today is the exact day that Henry realizes he might actually care about his job. Him stepping up to the plate is frustrating to Casey, who is at that same instant pulling away from the gig to focus on a potentially huge career opportunity. However, it's not exactly easy for him, considering that Ron is drunk, Bobbie is on mushrooms, and Roman and Kyle are only focused on finding their way into the party to rub elbows with celebrities.
The presence of an actually competent catering professional is the perfect catalyst for all of this mayhem, and Bell's performance as an uptight bully is one of the most thrilling of her career. She strips herself of all the inherent charm she usually imbues into her characters to deliver a villainous cartoon that is perfectly calibrated to take Ron down a peg, and the recurring gag of her ignoring the person she's with to listen to someone speaking on her headset only has the staying power it does because of her delicately clipped deliveries and perfectly unsettling physical performance.
Not to be outdone, Coolidge pulls out the stops even more here, allowing her character's drug storyline to push her typically off-kilter deliveries to the next level. There is a line about lemons here that I wouldn't hesitate to categorize as the single best line in the entire series.
While her material is essentially a weaponized collection of non-sequiturs, the more focused character material is also quite funny while also putting gas in the engine for the characters to end up in interesting places at the beginning of the second season. This episode really allows Ken Marino to let loose, turning his tightly wound character into a whirling dervish of chaos, which perfectly accentuates Scott's finely calibrated series of less and less halfhearted attempts to rein in the group and save the day.
Kyle and Roman, as usual, find themselves in less interesting places as characters, though Roman delivers a quite funny running gag after being given a particularly humiliating assignment. The episode might focus on the main characters, allowing the comedy to thrive in that dynamic, but everyone does get a chance to play as they say farewell to the show's first (and at the time penultimate) season.
Author's Note: While it has been very fun breaking down this series one episode at a time, season 2 and the upcoming season 3 will be reviewed in more of a capsule format, covering an entire season in a single post. Look forward to that, coming soon!
Rating: A
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: television
