Oddly enough, this week ends up being the thinnest week, with the Thanksgiving holiday and various sporting events aired over the duration meant a lot of preempted network programming. We do get one highly-anticipated season finale, though…
The Chair Company‘s season finale: “Minnie Mouse coming back wasn’t on my bingo card.” And now, I feel like the David Lynch comparisons make a lot more sense. Specifically, I found myself thinking of Twin Peaks: The Return with this episode following the previous one. I feel like I can’t say more without spoiling it, but if anyone wants to know more, we can discuss it in the comments!
Anyway, I did have some worries that the show might be losing its way or going nowhere with the series of tangents and bizarre characters Ron engaged with over the season… but these last two episodes really put any of my worries to bed, and I found it pretty consistently funny throughout. I’d love to get into this more, but I don’t want to give too much away. Again, we can discuss it in the comments if you’d like. I ended up being quite happy with the show on the whole. And we’re getting another season! That actually ends up making sense given how much is still left to unravel. I now feel pretty confident recommending this.
Smiling Friends, “The Glep Ep” – Also the season finale. After three seasons, we get an episode focused on Glep, who seemingly does nothing around the office and never goes on jobs like Charlie and Pim… and we get an extensive history, as Glep has apparently been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and he actually gave Mr. Boss the idea to start up Smiling Friends. And it’s a Christmas episode in the end! Pretty fun way to wrap up another solid season.
Beavis and Butt-Head, “Million Dollar Reward / Get Well Soon” – While at the post office, Old Beavis and Butt-Head see a reward flyer for a wanted criminal. Butt-Head gets the bright idea (in part from misreading the flyer) that you can get a million dollars for turning someone in for a crime, any crime. This leads to a series of events I almost don’t want to spoil, but… I mean, it’s a series of misadventures you may or may not be able to imagine; while some of the stupidity was foreseeable, certain directions the story goes definitely were not. And then, Beavis and Butt-Head notice the attention another student is getting for his cast, and Butt-Head decides Beavis needs to break his arm so he can score. Naturally, this leads to a series of physical catastrophes for Beavis. That was a fun episode.
Thankfully, Monday night didn’t land on the holiday either this week or last, so we still get our regular doses of…
St. Denis Medical, “I Left a Woman on the Table” – Jessica Lowe guests as… Matt’s wife?! Ex-wife, really, when he left his isolated community / fringe religious cult / whatever you want to call it to move to the city and be a nurse… and she’s intent on winning him back. This ends up being a pretty good plot that provides some humor and also shows us more about Matt– I like that, despite his baby face and the lesser regard the doctors hold him in, that he may actually be the most masculine of them. Speaking of the doctors, Ron becomes intrigued by Matt’s… community after learning the high regard in which they hold their elders and the natural beauty (and cheap land) that comes with where they live. And Bruce starts reflecting on being alone, and tries to rekindle things with a doctor he dated… who is now dating Chaplain Steve. This story led to some very funny and unexpected places. And last but not least (well, maybe least), Joyce decides to help on the floor with the nurse shortage and prove they can turn around more patients in a shift than they have been. Good episode.
DMV, “Splash Fountain” – So, like, what even is friendship? This is, as much as anything, the thematic question of the episode, as Colette trying to show Cece you can catch more bees with honey than with vinegar (“You did get it wrong. It’s flies. Why would bees buy their own product?”) by striking up a friendship with Barb to cajole her into buying a new coffeemaker for the branch. This proves to be more than she can handle. Vic starts to get jealous of Gregg striking up a friendship with the DMV worker support hotline as he tries to get a new chair. He tries to strike up a friendship with Noa, based on their mutual love of things like protein powder and working out, but Vic is, well, still too much of a meathead douchebag to make any lasting connection. (And I don’t want to spoil the twist in Gregg’s new friendship, but you may be able to guess it.) Fun episode; the show seems to have started to hit a stride here, where it’s still not overwhelmingly funny but it does avoid some of the more loony and unrealistic stock-character behavior, and with the great cast, is funny enough to be worth watching weekly.
That’s it! Most of the network shows that aren’t on here will show up again next week.
Continuing the lack of progress on Solar Opposites and Futurama. We’ll get to them at some point. I thought I might get in some Solar Opposites this week, but other activities ended up taking priority.
Our friend (the same from previous entries, since I basically have one friend here I see more than once a year) spent some of the Thanksgiving holiday with us, and we all took the opportunity to show him some of our favorite shows he’d missed. That mostly ended up being Party Down, and while didn’t go straight through it, we did show him the early episodes and a selection of some of the best episodes… which actually covered a lot of the show’s original run, in the final analysis. Anyway, still a great show.
He also hadn’t really watched The Simpsons in so long, that he wanted to go through some golden-age highlights. We started with season 3, getting through “Bart the Murderer,” “Saturdays of Thunder,” and “Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk.”
The Chair Company and Smiling Friends aired their season finales Sunday night.
We’ll be back in January.
About the writer
Captain Nath
Born on the bayou, thriving in the mountains. Writer, gambler, comedian, singer-songwriter, bon vivant, globetrotter, and all-around Renaissance Man with perfect opinions about TV and music. Pronounced with a long A and with the H.
It's a gaming ship.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Three, Episode Four, “Iron Guts Kelly”
“Can you believe that breakfast?”
“Premature leftovers.”
This is the one where a general dies having sex with Margaret, a premise so good that the episode has basically nothing else going for it beyond being funny; one thing that intrigues me about the show on this watch is how its iron discipline means it frequently hits high and rarely drops below good – putting it in simple terms, very few episodes drop below 3/5. It’s a show that benefits from a brilliant idea but isn’t dependent on it.
Kelly has three stars on his surgical hat.
“Did you try to resuscitate him?”
“How do you think he died?”
Loretta Switt is great as Margaret here, because she’s genuinely distressed.
Frank perplexed is always the funniest thing to me (“What’s the General’s star doing out here?”)
Keene Curtis as the General’s aide is the real MVP here – incredibly funny and self-serious.
We have to mention that Iron Guts Kelly is played by James Gregory, who is just perfect for the part.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Back for Christmas” – That sure was an episode of the show. More later.
The Practice, “Liberty Bells” – Ellenor manages to pull a rabbit out of her hat by discovering the nightshirt of the raped murder victim was buried with her, and then by convincing the victim’s father to let them open the grave and test the nightshirt for DNA. (Why is it buried with her? Because she was Jewish and there is a custom to bury murder victims with the clothes they were killed in to gain God’s compassion. I had never heard this when I first saw this. I have no idea why an Irish Catholic writer knew this.) And even after the DNA test seems to clear the accused, the state cannot let go. Excellent performances all around, including Gregory Itzin as the DA facing Ellenor, George D. Wallace as the judge in the case, and Camryn Manheim at her peak., (This is Itzin’s second of five appearances, never as the same character twice.)
More of The Great, with another eruption of plot occurring thanks to a smallpox outbreak. (The repeated “Well, they ARE serfs” made me cackle.) We get more of a battle of wills between Archie and Catherine over how much Russia and the court can change, with Peter caught in the middle, while Count Orlo struggles with “feeling not myself…and the most like myself” now that he’s outright killed a guy. The aftermath of the outbreak is pretty heartbreaking for one character and suggests Peter can only change so much.
Notes: Poor Vlad in the cabinet, both a funny and pathetic image. Orlo drunkenly spills to Velementov of the aborted coup, so we’ll see if plot consequences spin out of that. I’ve come to really like Marial after thinking she was a stock smartass servant character at first. (Also previous episode note: the reveal of why Peter is so angry at Marial’s dad is shocking, extremely hilarious, and…well, hell, I’d have banished his family too.)
Live Music – Dim Wizard, over from Washington DC. I never got to see the frontman’s previous band Bad Moves and was very sad when they split recently after releasing two albums that were each among my favourites of their year. This new project has only released collaborative singles so far, with members of Ratboys, Illuminati Hotties, Jeff Rosenstock etc on guest vocals. But the live band obviously jettisoned that side and shared the vocals among themselves, and the end result was that they sounded just like Bad Moves. Hooray for consistency! And hooray for powerpop.
Fucking annoying going to a gig on “Spotify wrapped day” though. Can’t believe people are still happy to openly admit their patronage of one of the most openly, transparently shitty companies out there. Genuinely makes me lose a little hope for the world, not that I had much anyway.
Woo, live music, and power pop! Yeah, I refuse that Wrapped shit, though I’m pretty sure Tidal is doing a version.
I agree about Spotify, and here’s a more elaborate response: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/dec/03/spotify-wrapped-ai-create-your-own-playlists?brid=LmB3b4gTIgLDl0seWoURBw
I like the idea of doing our own personalized year-end wrap-ups, leaning into our actual experiences and feelings. We should have a special comment thread for that on a Tuesday (and if people put up their thoughts on the year in music elsewhere, they can link them there then).
Wooo live music! And as always, BOOOOOOOOOOO Spotify.
Wooooooo live music!!
On The Chair Company:
Of course, the Lynchian comparisons also work in all the ways there is an ugly, surreal underbelly to a seemingly placid town. The biggest difference is that, instead of supernatural forces of evil working behind the scenes, some of the surreal moments are probably due to our POV character’s repeated series of head injuries.
To that last point, if you watched the finale,