The Episode: “Cazsh Dummy Spillionaires” (Season 3, Episode 1)
The Plot (Specific to This Video): After Penny falls down a flight of stairs, she ends up in a body cast, forced to rely on Max for help while she recovers. However, after meeting her hot, gay physical therapist (Matthew Del Negro) Max actually prolongs Penny’s recovery in the hopes of getting closer to his new crush. His ultimate plan is to push Penny out of the way and convince the therapist to give him a massage under the pretense that Penny isn’t available that day.
He finally makes his move by lacing Penny’s overdosed “sleepy tea” with pills he calls “nature’s Ambien.” As she slips into unconsciousness, Penny realizes exactly what’s happening and accuses Max of “misery-ing” her, crying out in a deeply tired voice, “You’re a monster.” Upon waking up, Penny attempts to escape from her room, but can’t, what with the body cast and everything. She does eventually get out, resulting in this confrontation:
The Video:
Commentary: Happy Endings was a perennial bubble show at roughly the same time as Community. A year after NBC yanked Community around on its schedule and took it off the air with no promise of a return ABC did roughly the same thing with Happy Endings before burning it off with a run of back-to-back episodes on Friday nights. The interesting thing was to see how fans reacted.
Community fans organized fan-made art shows, produced short documentaries and turned #SixSeasonsAndAMovie into an actual thing. They took ownership of the show, and did everything they could to convince NBC to keep Community around. Happy Endings fans…um, didn’t do any of that, at least not in anywhere near the same numbers.
The reason why, I recall seeing argued on Pajiba.com at the time, was that Community had an audience surrogate figure (Abed) and a reputation for ingenious pop culture parodies. There was something deeply personal about rallying around a show which featured a character like Abed who similarly rallied around his own favorite show, NBC’s The Cape. Community‘s characters arcs may have largely stalled around season 2, and Jeff, Britta and the gang were quite often truly terrible people or, if not outright terrible, remarkably mean-spirited, not the type whose lives inspire much audience investment. However, we could see ourselves in Abed, and we were forever looking forward to whichever genre or specific film or TV show Dan Harmon would deconstruct next
It’s not like the show didn’t have some heart, though. Similar to Community, Happy Endings would go through the typical sitcom motions and end episodes with emotional speeches, usually involving Brad and Jane getting over their issue of the week or Dave and Alex feeling out their on-going romantic tension. Plus, I’d argue its characters actually liked each other far more than the shouting-match prone group on Community did.
Unlike Community, there was never quite the sense that this collection of people, as a group, might be a disruptive force to society
Still, I remember watching the scene where Max drugs Penny in this episode and thinking, “This is one of the most important episodes in the show’s history, its first episode on its new night going up against New Girl, and if anyone is sampling it for the first time they just watched a man literally drug his best friend just so he could have sex with her trainer.” Of course, I was also laughing out loud at the same time.
That type of thing is cool now. Entire shows are now built around the marketable premise of “These people seem like monsters,” e.g., Hulu’s Difficult People. That’s pretty much FX’s entire comedy brand, although You’re The Worst evolved into a far deeper show than anticipated. However, back then what was there in Happy Endings to rally around? It was a bunch of white people and one black guy telling a thousand jokes per minute, often times openly mocking each other. The fact that Max and Brad were very different kinds of sitcom characters, an anti-Will & Grace gay man and a proudly effeminate black man, just didn’t have the same cache as “OMG, did you see Community‘s zombie episode?” Community was a sitcom about sitcoms and pop culture; Happy Endings was just a sitcom, albeit a hilarious one.
From a bottom-line perspective, Community was also far closer to 100 episodes thus furthering Sony TV’s incentive to keep it going
Even with “Cazsh Dummy Spillionaires” Misery-lite storyline, Happy Endings wasn’t a show which was ever going to do an entire bottle episode about a lost pen or turn a botched biology class experiment into a full-blown Law & Order homage. No, Happy Endings was a hangout sitcom with a great cast and a killer writing staff, but shows like that get unjustly canceled all the time. That’s not to say that there weren’t efforts to save the show, or that co-creators and co-showrunners David Caspe and Jonathan Groff haven’t taken the occasional meeting in the years since then at a network interested in some kind of revival. It’s just that, obviously, nothing has come of that yet. Community, on the other hand, came back for an improbable sixth season, and then performed so poorly it more or less killed its new network (not that it’s actually as simple as that).
That kind of thing can’t be good for the chances of a Happy Endings revival. Now that it’s up on Hulu, it can at least be enjoyed by an entirely new audience.
