Why You Should Give My Boys a Chance
Jim Gaffigan.
That's the short answer as to why the TBS comedy My Boys (now in its third season) deserves a shot. Because Jim Gaffigan is damned funny. Granted, he only has a supporting role on the show, but you take what you can get. And it doesn't hurt that the non-Gaffigan parts are pretty decent too.
I will confess that I wasn't crazy about the My Boys when it first came on. It seemed to suffer from an overly-precious conceit--namely that PJ, an incredibly cute sports reporter (played by Jordana Spiro) hung out with a bunch of platonic male friends and had guy problems. Spare me. The Just-One-of-the-Guys syndrome does not affect adorable blondes with locker room access. It just doesn't. However, forced by various boring and personal circumstances to catch up on a lot of TV last spring, I gave My Boys another chance and got hooked. Partly it was the way that the characters started to fill out into more three-dimensional and believable people. It didn't hurt that they stopped trying to be so coy about PJ's love life and history. And larger doses of Gaffigan in his slacker suburban dad persona were a big draw. But the kicker for me was the episode that mocked Sex and the City and everything it stood for--the Manhattan-centrism, the materialism, the cutesy writing, and the sheer Nineties-ness of it all. Not only did it succeed in setting up My Boys as a more modern and down-to-earth chick show (and make no mistake--it is a chick show, albeit a slightly more guy-friendly version with a minimum of shoe-related plotlines and no lengthy discursions on male sexual inadequacy), but it also deftly skewered its predecessor. Both PJ and Carrie Bradshaw might be cute writers, but the similarity between the shows and characters ends there.
Plus, there was the douchebag intervention. Possibly one of my favorite moments in the entire series, and a great send-up of both hipster culture and our cultural infatuation with therapy. And, on a less pretentious level, damned funny. To give some context to the scene, you should know that one of the members of this group of friends, Brendan, has fallen in with some cool hipster/Hollywood/scene types, and started to annoy everyone else with his affectations. In response, they stage a douchebag intervention. If this doesn't sum up why My Boys is worth a shot, then I guess we just have very different taste in TV shows. Oh, and . . . er . . . your taste is wrong: