Jess And Nick Are Morons, But They Belong Together

New Girl, S01E23

Jess tried to get over her breakup with Russell.  She seemed to be on the path to recovery until Nick made her think that under different circumstances, dating a lover from the past could be promising.  She ended up sleeping with Paul, which eventually led her to helping him propose to his girlfriend Jen.  Nick decided to move in with Caroline, even though he warned himself not to go down that path with her again in a DVD.  Winston got an earring after a wild night with his boss and refused to admit that it looked ridiculous.  Schmidt and Cece tried to find a way to interact with each other without turning Schmidt on since his penis was still broken.

I didn't have much time to feel bad about Jess moping about Russel because her friends' reaction to her listening to a record of "River" over and over were really funny.  The champion of complaints about her music polluting the apartment was Winston by far:

I liked it when you played it for the first time at 10 o'clock last night. I liked it a little bit less at 2 a.m., and now I'm kind of hoping that the sun comes up, thaws that river, and that woman drowns.

Sometimes Winston is the only one who knows just what to say (even though that didn't get her to stop the record).

When Jess was making a booty call after Schmidt got too distracted by Cece to make sure Jess didn't backslide, I had a feeling it wouldn't be Russell.  I was a little happy to see Paul show up again, as he is the boy version of Jess, but greatly disappointed to find out that he was in already in a happy relationship.  I thought it would be impossible for Jess to get out of that situation without looking like a huge whore or destroying what Jen and Paul had, but she managed to help him propose.  Wow.  That's amazing.  I mean, she even said the actual propose words for him and pushed him down to one knee.  I guess she really is the female version of Paul because Jess basically proposed to Jen herself.  That has to be love when you can have the girl your man cheated with propose to you and you agree with little hesitation.

What isn't love is whatever Caroline and Nick are doing.  I was really counting on Past Nick to knock some sense into him, but all it did was make him convinced that moving in with Caroline would be a better decision than the lack of progress he's made by being apart from her.  Damnit, Nick.  Caroline is probably part of the reason you can't move on because you haven't burned her from your life yet.  He's such a moron!  Jess had this pretty sweet speech to him about not settling and how she would handle the voice in his head that discourages him, and he basically barfed in her face with the news he was moving in with Caroline.  I wanted to jump through the TV and choke him!  He ruined the moment!  This could have been their turning point that let Nick see that Jess is the girl for him.

Jess and Nick being morons was my main focus in this episode.  The only good thing about Cece and Schmidt's story is that Schmidt's penis is still out of service, so we don't have to hear his disgusting stories about how he has screwed Cece.  Cece's grandmother was a cute little lady, though.  Besides that, I didn't care what they were doing.  As far as Winston was concerned, he was the only good side dish to Jess and Nick dancing off to "Bad Decision Land."  My favorite joke at the expense of Winston's increasingly bad earring (it started off as a stud and ended with a flamboyant feather type) was one of Nick's:

Oh, and Mr. T called. He wants to punch you because that earring looks stupid.

For being the voice of reason most of the time, it's incredible that he couldn't see how gaudy his piercing looked.

This was kind of an exciting episode to see how the stupid actions of Nick and Jess would pan out.  It's unfortunate that Jess' revelation of moving forward was too late to influence Nick's decision to move out.  I'm unhappy that he couldn't listen to reason, but I know that somehow Jess and/or the others will find a way to help Nick before he reverts back to the sad sack we had to see in the DVD.  As long as something goes horribly wrong (as it often does) for Nick while he's living under one roof with Caroline, there's still hope that he will come to his senses and start seeing Jess as his destined match.  If Nick ends up happy shacking up with Caroline in the next episode, however, someone needs to shoot him.

Wrestling For Some Good Material

American Dad, S7E12

I have a hard time deciding anything to discuss about Sunday's American Dad because it just didn't do anything for me comedy-wise.  Which is strange because usually when Roger and Stan are battling each other, it usually turns out to be a little crazy.  Instead, there was just a desperate Stan trying to hold onto a teenage sports record, while Roger more or less did things by the book to shatter that record and get his own little museum in their house.  This was ridiculous in not the good way. 

 The only thing I sort of smiled about was when Roger was leading Francine and Stan out of the Stan museum and showed them a CD:

Make sure to check out our Stan Smith pan flute rain forest music. Each song sounds the same, yet somehow manages to be worst than the last.

That joke was on point.  I'm surprised that there weren't more good jokes from Roger, considering he was doing a sport that required him to lay on top of people.  He had a few sexual references here and there, but nothing too creepy that you had to laugh at to hide your discomfort.  And that is what makes Roger a great character usually, but I felt like in this episode he was pretty tame by his standards.  I thought Roger locking Barry into a freezer to only have him roll out into the gym on fire was almost funny.  But it wasn't enough to get me to laugh.

 They stretched out a gag about the principal betting on ridiculous things (like when a girl would get her period--eww!) to the very last seconds of the episode where he was betting on preschool children coloring within the lines.  They wouldn't have needed to do this if the episode had been funny enough itself, but they wanted to add in that extra joke before they were done.  It just made me think that the 30 minutes would have been better spent on an episode about the principal's gambling problem rather than the Stan and Roger wrestling match.

I'm really wondering if the Seth MacFarlane shows have lost their charm with me or if they are just going through a rough patch of episodes.  I'd like to think that I still enjoy random violence, obscure references, and obscenity just for humor sake, but I really haven't liked anything in SF world lately.  I did like that Stan as an old man one, so I guess I shouldn't be too quick to judge, but I think that I should consider pulling one or two of these shows from my primary TV routine.