5x03 The Great Recession

[5.5/10] This one felt dated (thankfully) given its topicality, but even apart from that, it was a bit all over the place. There was some decent farce with Frank and Dee trying and failing to be door-to-door salesmen, but Frank’s suicide attempts never quite crossed that line into laugh-worthy gallows humor. In the same vein, Charlie roaming around trying to find a place to stay had its moments, and his crazy logic for heating the bar using trash and the “coors” sign were amusing, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, and the bit with his creepy uncle similarly never ascended from “gross” to “funny.”

There’s some amusing schtick with Dennis and Mac not understanding how economics or basic budgeting work, but they dragged it out and hit the same joke over and over again to quickly diminishing returns. (Though I did enjoy Mac just completely failing to understand how the Dave and Busters card functions.) And while there was supposed to be some commentary about “old poor” looking down on “new poor” or the bailout stuff, most of it was pretty tepid.

Overall, a pretty weak episode, with a couple of good laughs but also a good amount of dross.