Close Enough Review: So Long Boys / Clap Like This

"YEAAAHH! Finally, some white guys are making it! YEAAAHH!"

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If last week's episodes demonstrated the greatness that Close Enough is very capable of reaching, this week's batch perhaps more represent the weakness that can come out of its composition. Neither episode is particularly bad, but they come across as somewhat strained efforts that struggle to offer much new, even if they manage to make some interesting comments along the way.

"So Long Boys," thematically, is pretty easy to appreciate. The idea of centering an episode around Josh being intent upon receiving a vasectomy risks Close Enough flirting with some gracelessly bawdy material, but to the show's credit, that aspect is fairly restrained. Instead, it's a character piece, centered around Josh feeling a need to step it up and become more responsible following a pregnancy scare from him and Emily having unprotected sex. It's instantly easy to appreciate Josh here; even if he's the sort of guy that organizes a vasectomy party built out of inappropriate sight gags, he's also the sort of guy who always wants to do right for his family without any amount of selfishness impeding upon that.

It's only after a visit to the Dr. Ferguson's urology center that the festivities of "So Long Boys" truly kick off, though, for whatever they're worth. Josh's first bout of concern comes from the revelation that his vasectomy will be performed by a state-of-the-art robot from Boston Robotics, and those concerns only amplify when a ride through the urology's pro-vasectomy amusement park ride, featuring an animatronic pair of siblings fighting and delivering a fear-mongering song, leaves him with an even greater longing for another Ramirez-Singleton baby. It's a sequence that feels inspired on-paper, finding some interesting visuals and featuring some rather slick first-person animation, but for whatever reason, it doesn't quite pop. If the idea isn't underbaked, the writing keeps things from becoming the laugh riot that they should and leaves a lot to be desired.

The Emily portions of the episode are also theoretically interesting. There's something refreshing about seeing all the ladies of the cast together, with her, Bridgette, and Pearle suffering through an emotionally-turbulent brunch, let alone that it's low-key amazing to see three ethnically-diverse women (!!) holding down some rather furious character work. I just think that, simultaneously, its biggest weakness is in its conception: since every character exists in their own world, with a neglected Bridgette forced to mediate between Emily's emotional breakdown and Pearle's drunken antics, there's not much of them really bouncing off of each other so much as operating in isolation. It's ultimately nice for those scenes to pour into Emily arriving at the same conclusion as Josh, though, and while it feels a bit convenient for the sake of the narrative, it's great to see a show where its characters can communicate with each other responsibly and maturely.

The only person who gets a somewhat successful plot is Alex, even if it's (unsurprisingly) the looniest. The ride's animatronics turn out to be, in fact, a pair of incredibly technical hip hop dancers trapped under Dr. Ferguson's exclusive contract... and they bear a striking resemblance to Alex, a former frequent sperm donor of the urology clinic. Giving Alex a shot at significant material is infallible, and the ensuing emotional rollercoaster he goes on in his efforts to protect the children and become their fatherly figure—even after the revelation that they're, with confirmation, not his children—makes for a fantastic showcase of his unique brand of dramatics. Please give him more to do, guys.

All three plots intertwine in the episode's climax, with the Boston robots turning out to be evil contraptions hellbent on brutalizing Josh's genitals, but it puts all of the episode's points of interest under a blanket of relatively lukewarm material. As I mentioned last week in regards to "Robot Tutor," doing episodes centered around robots going haywire is such a dangerous well to pull from because of how fatigued the premise is. In spite of that, though, "Robot Tutor" was able to use the mechanic as a means of unlocking the potential of our cast; "So Long Boys," on the other hand, lacks a sharpened perspective and subsequently fizzles out in spite of the climax's energy. Everything balances out to a net positive, but the fact that it feels like that has to be quantified in comparing what the episode accomplishes versus what it struggles with cements its fate for me as passable, though conflicting.

"Clap Like This" is a bit of a step up, but doesn't really deliver anything more or less than you'd expect from Close Enough; if it's not prototypical to a fault, it never really surpasses your expectations. Like "So Long Boys," there's some interesting character work at play that ensures that the episode is still looking forward, but execution-wise, it's another case of Close Enough operating within its comfort zone, however reliable that comfort zone is for a wild ride.

Perhaps a lot of that stems from the fact that Josh's plot, which serves as the core of the episode, isn't anything too challenging. It's Close Enough's effort to continue the ongoing lineage of episodes built around communication errors causing characters to dig their own graves, though the show at least finds an edge in the earnestness of its messaging. After a seven-figure deal for one of his video games falls through, Josh is too embarrassed to confront his family's hedonistic, money-wasting dreams and proceeds to bury himself under increasingly unsavory TV installation jobs. Like the episode it's paired with, Josh comes across great in "Clap Like This," working his ass off to ensure that his family gets to live their happiest lives at his own expense, but the episode is more concerned with humor than anything else, swapping meaningful character work for its interest in satirizing rich LA millennial culture.

Bridgette gets some more interesting material to work with. Considering how shockingly little we know about the character's life at a more intimate level, it was a nice opportunity to give her something heftier than playing the support roles she's so accustomed to, facing an impasse when her mother cuts her off on her 26th birthday. Bridgette as a character possesses a pretty innate ability to elevate the material that she's given, so even if she has a fairly pedestrian plot to work with, getting a crappy job at a Forever 23 and becoming the victim of a secret mannequin rave threatening to turn her into spare parts—and yes, Close Enough is probably the only show you can really call "pedestrian" with that brand of shit going on—Bridgette comes out on top. I just hope she'll get as strong material as Josh or Alex do as the series progresses.

Eventually, the episode's two plot points conjoin, with Josh called in to repair a broken monitor at the Forever 23 that the mannequins need to successfully turn Bridgette into plastic, and Emily and Candice trickle into the scene a little later. (Alex, unfortunately, sits this episode out for the most part, but his brief interactions with Bridgette, equipped with a bombshelter-grade pail of hummus, are a lot of fun.) It's theoretically the show at its peak, tunneling its unsuspecting cast into such an absurd, life-threatening scenario, but the fact that both episode plots gradually stepped further and further away from more compelling places for the sake of landing their respective jokes takes away a lot of the fulfillment that "Clap Like This" could theoretically offer... at least until the ending.

If most of the episode isn't too great to me, that ending exists to perfectly validate its creative decisions: after discovering that the mannequins' attempts to clap cause them to fall apart because of their inflexibility, Josh gets Candace to screen-share Clap Like This across the walls of the Forever 23, causing all of the mannequins to clap along to the irresistible game and implode upon each other. It almost feels like the idea of Clap Like This is just a vehicle for the ending to work, but the fact that it's a direct reference to a decade-old visual gag from the second episode of Regular Show that Close Enough managed to fashion such a specific plot out of makes everything all the more impressive.

Things return to normal quickly afterwards: Josh comes clean to Emily and Candace and they return to living their normal lives, and after Bridgette's mother sees how poorly she's paid, she hooks Bridgette back up with her money supply. It's a serviceable end to a serviceable episode, if one that gets led astray by the show's tendency to veer crazy. At the very least, as with "So Long Boys," the show's legitimate interest in the interpersonal relationships of its characters and what compels them to act in the ways that they do ensures that enough of "Clap Like This" lands to feel worthwhile.

Close Enough is nothing if not well-intentioned, which is something worth celebrating; as an ode to the complicated nature of ascending to the next stage of adulthood, it's smart, compelling, and perpetually charming. It just needs to set its priorities straight, grounding itself in its characters more than the circumstances that they're thrown into. That's the sort of creakiness you should expect from a show in its first season, though, and as I've said before, this is a show that's so self-assured already that, with just a little bit of fine-tuning, Close Enough will be unstoppable.

FINAL GRADES:
"So Long Boys": B-.
"Clap Like This": B.

Next Friday: Alex and Bridgette go on a double date, and Emily has a run-in with a snail.

For my last review of the last two episodes, "Robot Tutor" and "Golden Gamer," CLICK HERE.

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