Unhappily Ever After

One thing I forgot to include in my weekend post — about why Unhappily Ever After has turned out to be the better of Kevin Connolly’s two shows — is this clip, which may be the closest thing this show had to an iconic moment (well, that and all the scenes of drunken audience members hooting at Nikki Cox), and sort of sums up why this crass, stupid, cheap (it was literally the lowest-budgeted scripted network show of its era) has gained a certain cult following. The hero talks to his imaginary friend about how to deal with his daughter’s unsuitable boyfriend, and they spend three minutes discussing the best solution: kill the boyfriend, and then kill six random strangers so that the police will look for a motiveless serial killer.

Like Alan Sepinwall, I’m sort of fed up with Entourage. (Also like him, I thought it showed promise last year when they threatened to shake up the formula and ruin Vince’s career, suggesting a new dynamic where his career goes down while his friends’ careers are doing better. But they just couldn’t stick with it.) When I want to see Kevin Connolly in a socially-irredeemable show with weak writing, I will watch old episodes of Unhappily Ever After on YouTube. Here are several reasons why Unhappily Ever After holds up better than Entourage:

Entourage has been renewed for a sixth season. We will now take bets on whether Vince will be back to his old star status within the next couple of years, or whether his career will end up like Drama’s. It’s actually more realistic for someone whose career collapses to come back as a character actor/supporting actor — people who make movies like Medellin usually have to start over again — but based on the fifth season so far, the writers could go either way with Vince: either continue to have his career go down while other characters’ careers are going better, or return things to the status quo. (Full disclosure: I haven’t yet seen last night’s new episode, which I understand was one of those things that was probably much more fun to shoot than to watch.)