I’m closing in on three years of reviews, and I’ve, of course, never missed a week. *Ahem* Lest you think that Perfect Strangers is my entire life, though, I do chain-watch other shows. Given, many of my choices are based on lines of inquiry arising from watching Perfect Strangers, so I take it back: I have no life. Send vitamin D, guns and money; get me out of this.*

Here’s the list of sitcoms I’ve watched (at least in part) for the purposes of reviewing this neverending buffet of entrails: Taxi, Mork & Mindy, The Bob Newhart Show, Newhart, Family Matters, The Honeymooners, Peep Show, and most recently, Roseanne. Mork and Taxi I watched to understand what pieces Balki was built from (and I’m thinking of checking out Bosom Buddies and Laverne & Shirley as well), and I’ll get into those later on at some point on this blog. I watched Newhart and Roseanne because I wanted to compare Perfect Strangers to long-running shows that chose how they got to end. I’d argue that those shows’ finales were arguably the two most impactful in terms of how boldly a sitcom can go out. I mean, ever. Peep Show I watched because I needed a reminder that you can successfully write about two stupid bachelors living together without having them throw raw poultry at each other every week.

Perfect Strangers has decided what end it wants to finish in (hee hee). I honestly think it decided before season 6 started, based on the fact that the season 5 interviews we looked at indicated that everyone’s contracts would be up by the end of season 7. Perfect Strangers has elevated its trademark habit of stretching out jokes to a meta level, dragging the only story it could come up with–Larry and Jennifer deciding whether they’re ready to hold hands in public–across two whole seasons. I sense a possibility that Perfect Strangers even got to end twice, but we’ll have to see if that bears out. We may eventually discuss Roseanne’s and Newhart’s endings; but I saw some similarities between their sixth seasons that I think are noteworthy here.

Now, on a show like Roseanne, even knowing beforehand what would happen in season 9 (among other things: Jackie gets dumped by Ernest and Roseanne has a dream about Jerry Springer), I knew that everything leading up to that point had the potential to surprise me, because change and growth were baked into the formula of the show. It’s also fair to say that Roseanne nailed the “show about nothing” before Seinfeld did, as large stretches of numerous episodes featured characters basically hanging out and musing on whatever. One of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for writing is that “every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action”; and with very few exceptions, Roseanne followed that rule. Newhart, I’d argue, stuck with the former almost exclusively after its fourth season.

To its credit, for its first forty episodes or so, Perfect Strangers did both. But since then, every Larry story reveals the same thing as every other Larry story, and every single thing Balki says or cooks could be generated by simplistic AI. Even if you don’t know how Perfect Strangers ends, you know how Perfect Strangers ends. It’s all but hamstrung itself narratively, at least as far as Cousin Larry goes. It’s been casting about for more than a season for something to do with Balki–do viewers like to see him at school? Should he get a different job? How would audiences feel if he adopted a bird/horse/child/different accent? Though even if it were to find something remotely interesting, the show will never let him leave Larry’s side.

I was also reading an interview with Martin Amis today, and he believes novelists have “tanks” they draw from, some bigger than others’. Reading slightly between the lines, he’s saying that thanks to increased lifespans in the past century, we’ve been better able to determine when someone’s tank is used up, simply by seeing when their output becomes inferior. Another implication is that the tanks are based on experience. (Do I think my tank of experience has emptied? Well, I’ve never had buttsex but I’m pretty sure I can write jokes about the rest of this show.)

Roseanne had so many things going for it. The premise of the show grew out of Barr’s standup persona, to wit: I’m a fat housewife, here’s what life is really like for many women like me who don’t get a voice. That sensibility–that package of speaking truth to male power & lower-middle-class concerns–informed the majority of the first two seasons. The Conners do their taxes; Roseanne quits her job because her boss is a sexist taskmaster; the Conners get family photos taken; Dan and Roseanne get to go to a nice restaurant because they have a coupon. By the end of season 2, I felt that Roseanne’s tank of “housewife” topics she wanted to tackle was about used up; but luckily, her show had one of the best groups of actors you could ask for, who all perfectly inhabited the characters in the family structure chosen.** And child characters lend themselves to stories with actual character growth. Moreover, they allow the opportunity to utilize the same situations multiple times because each character will handle them differently; Roseanne even got to use that fact (the differences between Becky and Darlene’s personalities) to generate meta-stories about how each was upset at the parents’ differential treatment. Roseanne was drawing on multiple tanks, and even if the latter tanks (characters/actors/writers) seemed to be getting low, the show’s increased popularity allowed it to take bigger risks and pull stories about child abuse and marijuana from the first tank. Hell, the tanks made each other work better: Roseanne couldn’t have explored Darlene’s depression if Sara Gilbert weren’t such an amazing actor. All that said, even season 6 Roseanne felt like it was losing steam and creativity (and budget: Jackie’s wedding in that season finale took place in the Conners’ living room).

Perfect Strangers started off with one tank: the original premise of a cultural exchange of values and approaches, where both cousins needed each other to navigate American life. The first few episodes offered just enough depth to surprise me, given what I expected from a TGIF (Tank Gauge Is Faulty) show. But that show–where two full-grown men learn to be adults–only had a tank so big, and we saw that reviewers in that first full year knew that Balki’s misunderstanding schtick couldn’t believably persist. Perfect Strangers cast about for new tanks, and actually found a number of them. I will still never understand why they didn’t do more episodes featuring the other apartment residents, as “The Rent Strike” is one of the few I’d be willing to watch again. (Yeah, why doesn’t this show cater to my interests specifically?) It brought in a workplace setting tank, and secondary character tanks… and then left them, I dunno, strewn haphazardly on the lawn? I’m done with the tank metaphor.

Bob Newhart got two long-running shows: one about a psychologist, his home life, his office colleagues, and his patients; the other about some guy who’s even more boring than your grandfather and his boring wife buying a boring old inn in Vermont. Somehow the latter outlasted the former by three years. By the end of The Bob Newhart Show’s final season, once-complex characters had been reduced to single-dimension jokes. Howard Borden’s descent from a man hopelessly trying to balance an overscheduled career with dating and being a divorced dad into a man who probably couldn’t find his way back out of a port-a-potty was sadder than Balki’s on the basis of change in elevation alone. Newhart’s sixth season had basically the same issue, to the point where the stories themselves formed a larger commentary: a total rejection of the idea that the leopard can change its spots, or that it should even try. And I don’t think it was that sub of a text. There was an episode about predicting exactly when the leaves would change color. The young lovers Stephanie Vanderkellen and Michael Harris, who in earlier seasons forged new ways to let their self-centeredness direct their personal growth, explicitly reject personal growth in favor of the structure marriage offers (and then reject even that because it was too much of a threat to their hedonism). Look, there’s a fucking episode that season about how the inn’s handyman buys a new style of pants and then decides that they’re just not him.

“Six seasons and a movie” has been a sort of rallying cry for Community fans. You’d have to point me to sitcoms that managed it, but maybe there’s something to the idea. It sounds right, doesn’t it? You’d want a good show to know it was ending and go out with a bang before it starts, um, tanking. I’d say that Roseanne’s sixth season was when many of the characters became decidedly one-note. Latter-day Roseanne would have you believe that Jackie had been a slut, not a single woman whose standards were perhaps too high for her social class; that Leon and Roseanne had been total shits to each other for years, and not simply two people clashing because one had a commitment to by-the-books customer service and the other refused to change her personality for a business setting; that Mark was a drooling buffoon, and not someone who had skills and heart hiding behind a shell he’d built up because he believed parents couldn’t love.

Maybe I took the long way around for this, but the point is that even remarkably good shows can start showing problems around their fifth or sixth season.*** That takes a little of the blame off Perfect Strangers, but it’s still true that that it reached that same flattened-secondary-character point at the beginning of Season 5, which would be the equivalent of season 4 for any other show.

But then, Perfect Strangers ran headlong into that situation, so maybe the race is to the swift after all.

TGIF: This gets increasingly frustrating, trying to assess 24 episodes of a show when I’ve watched five times that many. Perfect Strangers fanatic, video archivist, and all-around great bunch of guys Tim Caldwell warned me that this season is where it got bad. And he’s right: it felt like a worse show almost right away. Yet most of the complaints I have about season 6 are the exact same complaints I had about season 5: only Larry gets any story, they don’t know what to do with Balki, they refuse to give the girlfriends or coworkers any screentime, it’s often more interested in being a cartoon than a sitcom, it’s willing to shave off dialogue to the point that some stories make almost no sense. Season 6 intensified every one of those aspects, to the point that Gorpley and Lydia’s appearances were numerically cut by half, and at least two of Tess’s appearances were cut out entirely.

It all smears together, like poop, when you smear it together. I had the benefit the past few times of drawing out themes from the show’s preoccupations, like sports, money, death, or family-of-origin issues. Other than the fascination with death & destruction in the first few episodes, I’m not really feeling any other accidental themes here. There are a few trends that are worth noting, and I’ll start with the bad ones first.

Bronson Pinchot–god, yes, let’s definitely get the bad ones out of the way first–is increasingly wild in his interpretation of Balki. And I don’t mean wild as in “wild success” or like how Otto Preminger as Mr. Freeze would say “wild” to mean “groovy”. I mean wild like a downed power line or a chimp throwing its own shit at you. I’ve seen fans of the show (commenter davidmagrathsmith among them) say that Bronson no longer plays Balki the same way in season 6. He regularly oversteps the logic and mannerisms of Balki as we know him. Why does he act condescending when Larry lies, or fails, when previously he expressed genuine concern for the consequences Larry would face? Why does he whip out a Hulk Hogan action figure and shake it in front of Larry’s face? Why does he mimic orgasm with a duck call? Why does he drag out physical comedy bits like failing to put on his pants? Why does he take Art Carney’s mannerisms to such an extreme that he falls flat on his face?

In the aftermath of Second Sight, and then a couple of weeks ago, Bronson openly questioned the comic strength of his own choices, and admitted the benefit of someone to direct him. So the question becomes: why is he still breaking Balki? I think any of the possible answers are equally useful.

We had six–count ’em–six different directors this season. That’s not to say that Bronson was his usual Balki self when Joel Zwick was at the helm. But of the new directors, only one–Judy Pioli–got to work with him for more than a couple of episodes and establish any sort of relationship with him. I’m getting way ahead of myself conclusion-wise here, but I get the sense that Bronson responds to boundaries and direction when they’re offered. He claimed in some interview to not have had more than a week or two to practice that Honeymooners bit, either, which makes me wonder what role the director has in “practice”.

Two days after winning his second presidential election, George W. Bush said “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it…. there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view….” Bronson’s 50-odd Dutch phones may not have been ringing off the hooks with calls to be in big movies anymore, but he still had Perfect Strangers. I doubt that the paper contract on file for him said anything about which accents viewers did or didn’t like, so Bronson may have felt free to stretch Balki.

A third answer: Perfect Strangers found that the tank (sorry) full of cartoon slapstick had the most longevity, so can you blame Bronson for going in the same general direction as the show? Balki’s whole world is more detached (Mypos floats around, remember), with “culture” represented by rabbit snares, plants that can cure any illness, and a pantheon built out of the dregs of Western pop culture and product branding. The writers aren’t always writing Balki like they used to: instead of learning how best to represent his collegemates, he wants to force them to learn other languages; he chides Larry for not caring about the community while digging in his heels on getting to wear a hat. In some ways, he’s doing exactly what the script tells him to.

Fourth: perhaps more to the point, the writers don’t seem to be writing as much as they used to. The most obvious example I can think of is the shorthand script notes for a whole stretch of dialogue in “Little Apartment of Horrors” (the bit where they keep repeating the plant name). How long can you imagine that the script for “Duck Soup” was after they cut out all the lines for why the fuck they were there in the first place?

We started this season with the image blah blah blah. The show took itself apart, so to speak, and has rearranged itself around a structure: the engagement, marriage, and living-in-a-house of Larry Appleton and Jennifer Lyons. But the construction of this cycle across two whole seasons has left us with lots of space to fill.

Hey, this fucking thing’s back! It wouldn’t be fair to say that the entirety of Season 6 has been so much useless air and space junk rushing to fill a vacuum. But part of it is, or I wouldn’t have bothered with the metaphor. I’m not stupid.

(Really, that vacuum should have been filled with Season 5’s promise that the cousins would become an investigative team. Oh well!)

“A Horse is a Horse”, “Call Me Indestructible”, “Little Apartment of Horrors”, and “Duck Soup” certainly fall into this rushing air category. Looping back around to the Kurt Vonnegut quote, these episodes reveal neither character nor plot. Well, okay, I take that back: we found out Larry doesn’t like parsley. But none of those have anything to do with the cousins’ relationship, other than to say they’ll find a way to disagree about anything if you give them a chance. What makes this category even more of a disappointment is knowing that Perfect Strangers proved it had the ability to take a left-field plot and turn it into something worthwhile. When “Great Balls of Fire” came so soon after “A Catered Affair”, I anticipated it being the beginning of a trend similar to that on The Simpsons, where Homer would have 10 different jobs each season. But someone on staff was awake enough that week to realize that new situations can reveal new sides of characters. It’s incredibly easy at this point to imagine a version of that episode where Jennifer had nothing to do but look at the fire pole when Larry pointed at it. But now we can count an anterior insular cortex among her many qualities. (Maybe next season we’ll learn if she has a reproductive system).

The third trend this season was discontinuity becoming part of the fabric of the show.**** Hell, even the first episode pretends that the cousins have never been Real Burgled before. “Family Feud” would have us ignore that there’s a whole island full of Bartokomous boys out there somewhere. You could say that “The Sunshine Boys” forgets what role Bunky McDermott played in Larry’s younger and exactly as vulnerable years; though I suspect it’s more accurate to say that the writers were too lazy to think up a different name. But mostly, the episodes this season seem to operate on the principle that the cousins haven’t been living together for years. Rather than ever putting in the work to make it look like Jennifer and Mary Anne had separate lives, the show had to invent convenient backstory just to try to convince us Larry that she was some kind of zodiacal killer. Larry not asking for fish parts to cure his common cold seems minor in comparison to the fact that it took months after his marriage proposal for him to even have–what, his fourth?–conversation with Jennifer without Balki around. I’m sure that innumerable sitcoms have this same problem at this age, but when the show hauled out the “lost memory” episode and gave itself a chance to explicitly define its own history, all it could come up with to say was “My name is Co-sin Laray App-le-ton”.

Speaking of the proposal episode, I was going to talk about how Perfect Strangers has been flailing for ways to include Balki in Larry’s stories, and trying to decide whether he should have a different job entirely. It has been, but good grief, that’s all I’ve talked about all season; is it okay if I just don’t get into it here?

There was definitely a vacuum in the scripts where the writers let the cousins expand on bits, which in turn pushed out important dialogue and a whole character; but the vacuum was still so voluminous that we got 10 hours of Balki cooking and singing. Everything is tradeoffs, and the writers made their choices of which tank to pull from. I make my own tradeoffs too, in the form of experimental and guest posts. It turned out that two of the later episodes this season had non-standard reviews, and this resulted in a comment I wasn’t able to make then: that the cooking and singing had payoffs in the form of “A Catered Affair” and “Out of Sync”. I don’t think those episodes needed quite so much wacky yellow buildup, and without knowing how many scenarios the writers had come up with prior to the season premiere, I can’t say which came first (the chicken or its marinated lungs). “Out of Sync” still comes across to me as an episode that arose mostly from the circumstance of having a rooftop set and musicians left over from the previous week’s Family Matters episode “Life of the Party”, which introduced the Urkel Dance. But damn if it didn’t seem logical that Balki could be a caterer by the end of the season.

I look forward to seeing what new types of story that career change opens up for the show in season 7. Ha ha ha.

Let’s talk about other good things from this season (trust me, I won’t keep you much longer). Perfect Strangers doesn’t appear to have had much to lose at this point, so it tried experimenting a little. “I Saw This On TV” was an experiment that in the scientific world would be unpublishable, and you’re right to remember that political capital quote above right now, and to be scared by it. I would say “The Men Who Knew Too Much” had good results. It spun its–and many other–wheels across 40 minutes, but having the cousins interact with the real world was worthwhile. The immediate Chicago of Perfect Strangers bends to the dual zaniness and neurosis of the cousins; seeing those aspects land them in a major public incident cements the viability of their cartooniness. Not only the viability–and I can’t believe I’m saying this–the believability too. Remember how I was saying that Ernest didn’t work when he alone was up against the real world? “The Men Who Knew Too Much” is a decent counterexample. But the structure of 1) the cousins find themselves in a remarkable situation and 2) make it worse by how they respond to it works here in a way that it absolutely doesn’t in “The Sunshine Boys”. The cousins need each other as protection from the big, bad world, and “The Men Who Knew Too Much” is one of the better explorations of that idea.

This season’s inauspicious start (the cousins not choking on poison gas) made it surprising that we got any good episodes at all. “Grandpa” may feel closer to a classic episode simply because half of it was one (season 1’s “Blind Date”), but that in itself provides a meta-aspect to Larry. We see now that Larry’s anxious depression may well have a genetic aspect; and the viewer is given permission to see hope or despair for Larry’s future, since he’s been through that very same set of emotions (100 times now).

The scenarios in “See How They Run” and “Climb Every Billboard” were brilliant in comparison to everything around them. With just a little assumption and inference on the viewer’s part, they’re interesting culture clashes. The cousins’s actions are–for the most part–coming from their own characters and histories. There’s some slight breaks in Balki’s character, and Larry still lies. The cousins may not learn the actual lessons the episodes were leading to, but at least we can all have fun imagining that they were there in the original scripts.

The few minutes of botched magic act in “Hocus Pocus” were funny because they riffed on an existing kiddie-entertainment touchstone. And the scene worked because of the dramatic irony involved in the viewer knowing how the children must have thought the humor was deliberate.

And let me be a completely honest overgrown child myself here: I love that there was an episode where the Cousins struggle with LASER BEAMS.

“Finders Keepers” featured that sickening scene of Larry threatening to deport Balki. I just want to make sure we all have that in mind when I say that it’s still my favorite episode from this season. Before you think I’m trying to compare that scene to a Persian Flaw, NO. Larry terrorizing Balki with threats of deportation is the most execrable his character has ever been. Like the communal vagina in “That Old Gang of Mine”, though, it’s simply the type of shit you have to deal with even in the good episodes of Perfect Strangers. Not only did “Finders Keepers” have a solid sitcom situation that could have gone almost anywhere, the show took it in a direction I would never have guessed and used regular and one-off characters to actual strong comic effect. (It also provided me a path to perpetrate the purplest prose I’ve ever produced, procuring my praise in perpetuity.)

Newhart and Roseanne had disappointing sixth seasons, but they both managed to bounce back and improve over their following two. Even writers on The Simpsons felt like the clock was ticking on the show’s lifespan and offered up a return to the focus on the relationships among the nuclear family members and some format experimentation in seasons 7 and 8.

On the other hand, there was Roseanne season 9. The Simpsons season whatever through the current one. AfterMASH. The 1960s Honeymooners revival. Season 4 of ALF. Seasons 7-9 of Family Matters. Buffy seasons 6 and/or 7. Scrubs season 9. Red Dwarf seasons VII through whichever point Philip thinks it got good again.

The odds are definitely stacked against Perfect Strangers improving in Season 7. Tanks run out, get damaged in shipping, go sour in poor storage conditions; market and societal forces slowly replace fuel ingredients, ensuring the tanks run forever as long as the audience doesn’t notice (or care about) the differences. The Simpsons and Fuller House could potentially endure until enough of the original cast members die off. In the former, the characters have dispensation to not grow up; in the latter, all you really have to do is add more people to a house to keep it going.

I compared Impel to Topps last week out of an impulse to benchmark good trading card “practice”. Comparing Perfect Strangers to The Simpsons’s gold standard would be unfair, but there are points of comparison. I wish we could live in a world where artistic output did not have to be chained to corporate greed, but the fact of the matter is that creative success will generally result in efforts to duplicate it. I believe that, if something longish-running should end, it should get a chance to do so creatively. I think Roseanne tried to with its eighth season; Newhart certainly did. The Simpsons has probably gone on too long for any ending that would adequately capture everything it has been over 30 years.

On the basis of its premise and quality, I think Perfect Strangers should have gotten to plan an ending in Season 5. Even if Season 6 had been its last, it could have packed its major story elements–Larry and Jennifer establishing a real relationship, getting married, and starting their new life; Balki becoming a full adult, and deciding what he wants to do and be as an American individual–into a solid 24 episodes.

Do I need any other argument than “Duck Soup” to say the show outlasted its own quality? Again the quote from George W. Bush is relevant, so the remaining hope I have for Season 7 is this: that 6 or 7 times this season we’ve gotten good scenarios, good characterization, and funny sequences, and that maybe we’ll get half that going forward. Also Belita Moreno will be in seven episodes, so I’ve got that going for me.

I doubt that Perfect Strangers started working toward its ending out of any sober recognition of its own artistic longevity. But it did start working towards it, I have to give it that. That’s more than most sitcoms get to do, much less try.

Well, that succinctly and completely wraps up Season 6 of Perfect Strangers, and I hope you–

Ah, shit. Tess. And the Honeymooners episode. Shit.

You know what? The only good thing I can say about “I Saw This On TV” is that Jo Marie Payton loved it. If the marriage arc caused a vacuum, “I Shat Out A TV” was its own separate black (and white) hole that had absolutely no justification for its own existence other than someone having remarked that there were, years ago, two other guys who did physical comedy. Were the writers aware that their decent story ideas were being utilized more effectively by better sitcoms like Full House and Family Matters, and that it would take pretending to be a better show to trick unsuspecting nostalgic baby boomers to tune in? These fucks had the gall to ask for an Emmy for that shit!

And the fuck happened with Tess? She popped out of Mrs. Holland’s old puss, wrecked some shit, and disappeared forever. If the marriage arc was so much stretched-out elastic waistband, the quick removal of an entire forced-in character was so much raw gaping asshole. It’s tempting to just write this off as the show’s typical instant rejection of any story that could let side characters grow or have an impact on the cousins lives; but for once, I think the show was actually trying to add someone. Tess would never grow, no, but that wasn’t the point. She had promise as one more Newhartian character to come in, be a little shit, and leave every few episodes. She had promise as a way to prepare Larry for fatherhood. Mostly, though, she had promise for ratings, so let’s try to figure this one out.

“New Kid on the Block” was filmed August 2, 1990, and aired October 5, 1990. Tess was intended to be in “Family Feud”–a scene was even filmed where she drives a dagger hilt-deep into Larry’s back–and that one was filmed on September 19, 1990. “Family Feud” didn’t air until October 26. But there was a third scene, in “Black Widow” (she pushes a bound-and-gagged Marvin Berman off Mt. Whitefish), which wasn’t filmed along with the rest of that episode on September 26. According to the fan site, the Tess scene in “Black Widow” disappeared between September 21 and September 25.

It’s clear that Alisan Porter was booted before “New Kid on the Block” ever aired. It’s (hangin’) tough to believe that the studio audience was so sickened by her 30 seconds of dialogue in “Family Feud” that they booed her offstage. And I doubt that filming on Curly Sue provided much conflict (or even would have had Porter stayed on Perfect Strangers). So, I don’t fucking know why she left.

Actually, you know what? I think I know what’s going on. Perhaps the show is now going in reverse. Season 4 ended with a would-be bride metaphorically losing face, and towards the beginning of Season 5 Lydia physically did the same via an eyelid tuck; Season 3 ended with an elderly woman dying before she could even reach the cousins, and Talky Tina winked out of existence before Season 6 could even get going.

If Season 7 were to, say, kick off with a blonde party girl settling down a group of rowdy men before the cousins came to physical harm, we’d know for sure, but certainly that many coincidences would strain believability, right?

5,000 words and I bet you greedy little shits still want a list, don’t you?

Best Episode: Were you not paying attention? It was “Finders Keepers”. Jesus.

Worst Episode: Drown in a vat of of mule piss, “Duck Soup”

Best one-off character: Judy Pioli as Widow Girlfriend

Worst handling of a one-off character: RIP Tess Holland. She’s lighting bags of poop on fire with the angels now

Best Balki moment: Tie between Balki having a horse named “Trotsky” and Balki wanting a Muppet Babies tattoo

Worst Balki moment: Tie between Bronson as Balki as Art Carney as Ed Norton; a sunburned Balki “trying” to “put his pants on”; and whatever the hell this was:

Season 6 catchphrase count: Balki (14.5); Larry (25!)

Season 6 boner count: Balki (2); Larry (2)

Cumulative catchphrase count: Balki (103); Larry (56)

Cumulative boner count: Balki (20); Larry (20.5)

Dance of Joy running total: 19

Join me next week for “Bachelor Party”!

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*Knock that one off your list of possible Larryoke songs, folks.

**I just want to say about Michael Fishman that there weren’t many stories about him in the first season of Roseanne, but he made me believe that when DJ was simply repeating others’ words or actions he was a child trying to learn the language of the family he was born into (insults he can say; thing it’s okay to be upset about). This concludes Roseanne Reviewed, thank you for reading.

***See also: Parks & Recreation had Leslie forget that the vacant lot was once a pit, but my bigger beef was that in its last few years, everyone got what they wanted, all the time, because they were just such pure people, wasn’t it nice. I know all y’all Lindas love this show, that’s why I’m burying this here.

****”Fabric” was in reference to the new couch they’d always had. I hope you understood it, enjoyed it, and told your officemates.