5x05 Housewarming

[7.0/10] This is another one that was just kind of...weird. It’s two stories rather than three, which I like! It gives the plots more time to breathe. But where half of the show went was just odd.

I liked the Johnny/Moira story though. The two of them looking after Roland Jr. together was definitely a standard sitcom setup, but it’s a venerable one for a reason. There’s a lot of comic juice to be squeezed from a pair of parents who did no parenting having to look after a baby. Johnny scrambling to take care of poo and spit-up while Moira reads from the Schitts’ baby binder and does commentary on her own movie is the kind of contrast that brings the yuks. Johnny wanting to prove that they could have been “hands on” parents only to collapse after one night is an amusing beat, and there’s plenty of funny dropped lines about pulling their nanny away from her daughter’s wedding that gives us a window into the Roses’ oblivious, self-serving largesse. It’s low stakes, classic sitcom fun.

I cannot say the same for Patrick’s high school themed housewarming. While the setting itself was kind of amusing, if only to wring gags from what David and Alexis’s high school experiences were like, what happens next is just kind of bizarre. Maybe I’m missing something, but it felt odd that everyone started hooting at Ted just because he was wearing a tank top and shorts. Then, grown adults playing spin the bottle, even at a high school-themed party, is kind of bizarre, and seemed to only exist to motivate the later drama.

Why someone decided the monkey wrench that need to be thrown into David/Patrick and Alexis/Ted was Ted kissing David while drunk during spin the bottle, I couldn’t tell you. Alexis and Patrick getting jealous and miffed over it seemed like a little much, and then David was kind of a dick about it. The whole thing felt miscalibrated. I guess there’s a decent throughline to Alexis wanting to see “Fun Ted” and then getting more than she bargained for. (Him making fun of her “ew”s was a hoot.) But for the most part, this is another storyline that felt pretty far removed from how anything approaching real human beings would act in this situation, and then tried to get real with it, only to make David seem like kind of a jerk.

Overall, I enjoyed the silliness of Johnny and Moira trying to look after a baby. I was much less into the younger members of the cast acting like babies.