6.10

Brooklyn Nine-Nine Focuses on Its Best Buds

Rebecca VanAcker Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Review , , , , , ,

The Mindy Project‘s Ike Barinholtz guest stars in one of the season’s goofier outings.

This is going to be a little shorter than my usual reviews, just because I liked the episode a lot but don’t feel like I have much to say about it. It was another strong episode in a strong season that relied on a lot of Brooklyn’s most dependable elements: Jake and Boyle’s friendship, Amy and Holt geeking out over something obscure, Terry over committing, and Rosa just generally being confused by it all.

It was nice to see a Jake/Charles story again, and Charles definitely needed his best bud for this one. I’ve been really pleased with the number of Jake/Amy stories this season, but that’s meant that both of them have had less time with other characters.

This show is great at taking a ridiculous premise, like Boyle having a Latvian son named Nikolaj, and turning it into a realistic and sort of lovely story. Here, we ended with a discussion about the complexities of adoption and the importance of friends listening to one another. Not bad for an episode that also had Terry Crews doing his best Caesar Flickerman.

Other quick thoughts:

Amy and Holt are such a pair in episodes like this, from laughing way too long to needing a thirty minute discussion over who was apologizing.

The Disney references cracked me up, and I can 100% relate to that being a point of commonality among friends.

Ike Barinholtz was the perfect person to play Gintars, and he and Andy Samberg were a lot of fun together.

What did you think of  “Gintars”? Hit the comments, and let me know!

The Mindy Project Review: Mindy Says Goodbye in “It Had to Be You”

Rebecca VanAcker Review, The Mindy Project , , , , ,

Image result for morgaan and tamra's wedding the mindy project

The Mindy Project is a show that I’ve consistently liked and often loved throughout its six-season run. The last couple of seasons haven’t been quite as sharp as the first few; much as it pains me to say, it was never quite the same once Chris Messina departed as a series regular. Mindy was at her best when she had a great foil, romantic or otherwise, and they never found one quite as good as Danny. Weirdly though, even though it led to a bit of a decline in the show’s quality, I was happy when, and am still happy that, Mindy broke up with Danny. At that point, he’d become insufferable, shown that he wasn’t the dream guy or even a good guy at that time in his life. More importantly, Mindy making that heartbreaking choice was her biggest piece of character development in the entire series.

That was a defining moment for The Mindy Project as well; it showed that, while the show loved romcoms, it didn’t have to be one. They deconstructed but never mocked the genre and proved that, even if Mindy Lahiri adored the idea of a romcom-worthy romance, she knew she was the heroine of her story, not the co-lead. She could want but didn’t need a man to be happy.

Impressively, though, she never gave up on the fantasy of love or became disillusioned with it. After all the romantic lows in her life: the breakups, the failed engagements, the recent divorce, in this series finale, Mindy was still a woman who believed in love as much as she did at the start of the series, a woman who ran across New York City to prove it.

Romcoms are all about the endings: the romantic gestures, the declarations of love, the “I run to you”s, moments so big they almost make you forget everything that came before. Our favorite movies are known for one unforgettable scene: a kiss in the rain, a proposal in broken Portuguese, countless sprints through airports. But this was about a woman discovering that perhaps the messy middle of a romcom is more satisfying than the fairytale ending. In a show that both deconstructed and paid homage to the genre, how appropriate that it subverted it with its ending: a quiet moment of Mindy watching TV with the father of her child, a man she loves not because he’s perfect but because he’s trying.

For me, the best shows are the ones where you can’t predict the outcome of the series finale while you’re watching the pilot because the characters have grown and changed and evolved so much throughout the course of the show’s run. Watching the first episode of The Mindy Project, I never would have predicted that this simple, everyday ending is what would make Mindy happiest. And I’m so, so glad that’s the case.

What did you think of The Mindy Project‘s series finale? Let me know in comments!