I found the first few episodes of Raising Hope to be charming and promising, but nothing that really inspired me to keep watching. Then I watched "Say Cheese," and I have decided to keep with the freshman comedy. The premise of a young father raising a baby with his two shotgun-married teenage parents and his senile great-grandmother actually has a lot of opportunities. As the baby grows, so does the father, and so do the just-breaking-40 grandparents, and as long as it keeps blending the dark-bordering-on-evil family dysfunction of Married...With Children with the mostly-well-intentioned dysfunction of Malcolm in the Middle, then we've got a winner.
Jimmy's attempts at wooing the grocery store clerk are a refreshing kind of awkward: cutesy, and not so painful. After The Office, sometimes its nice to see awkwardness outside of a mockumentary. It helps that Jimmy and Sabrina are doing just the right amount of flirting so we could buy them as both boyfriend/girlfriend as well as just friends.
I enjoyed the family portraits a lot. They were horrible. I've never experienced anything worse than a button-down shirt and a combover, never any ski-resort or French pictures. And my mother spent more of her time yelling at my little sister to stop messing up her hair and/or dress, and I just wanted to get it in and out, so Virginia holds the world cup for Family Portrait craziness!
It would definitely make sense, though, that Virginia would put so much emphasis on the family portrait. There's just so much about life that can't be controlled, so having one nice thing, just one, would work wonders for her. Sabrina hit the nail on the head, though. No family portrait is actually reflective of a family's true nature. No matter what they say, or how you see them act, no family is so sweet and wonderful to have such contentment and happiness. It also makes sense that, since Virginia thinks that a happy portrait means a happy family, a portrait with a theme, like skiing or France or just plain nice clothing, means that the family can do fun things together, which is something the Chances cannot do, and its the closest they can get to actually going skiing or actually going to France, or actually owning nice things without worrying about finance charges.
All that said, I do believe that Virginia is the worst/best kind of crazy. She simultaneously pushes Jimmy to kiss Sabrina, but then proceeds to block Jimmy's advances on the dip-couch, to make herself look less crazy, but does exactly the opposite.
Speaking of crazy, the writers need to figure out a better way to work Maw-Maw. In the past, she's been stumbling through various senile episodes with moments of lucidity, which is when I end up liking her the most. I give the character a bit of a pass, though, because A) for a family to put a crazy loved one in a home, it would cost much more than the time it takes to care for her, and B) this acting is probably the best they can do to keep Cloris Leachman from eating everyone alive.
The traffic light/singing scene is just the right amount of sweet to balance a show with so much sour. I believe that however low a show will dip for the nasty, that's exactly how low it should dip for the sappy. When Maw-Maw is giving pseudo-birth, you've gotta end on a "Whacka-Do" singalong in a pickup truck.
The whole Friends referencing moments with Jimmy/Sabrina and Ross/Rachel were great, and excellent meta-referencing. I will say that despite Sabrina's comments at the end and Virginia's yelling, I agree with Jimmy, that things could, and hopefully will, change between him and Sabrina.
Fun Things:
-It's not that I don't believe the family would compete over balloon bouncing, but where does Virginia get the time to defend her record?
-The pseudo-birth gave Maw-Maw's crazy a fluid line of thought, which made her a bit more likeable.
-Love/Hate Burt's long hair in the flashbacks.
-Hair eating is disgusting, but it gave Jimmy a nice dash of neurosis. It works.
-I don't know what I liked better: the price tags on the sweaters and the French outfits, or the lack thereof on Virginia's '50's outfit, implying that she actually owns it.
-"If I ever get that crazy, take me in the backyard and blow my head off with a shotgun."
-"I better go before this gets on Dateline."
-I never played with Shrinky-Dinks. The closest I got was that thing where you could bake rubber bugs. Does that count?
-"Ignore? How does that work on a phone? I mean, I can ignore people in real life..."
-The baby playing Xbox!
-"You know how I feel about finance charges!"
-I was half expecting Virgina to start macking on Sabrina when she sat on the dip-couch.
Grade: A-
Virginia's inability to be sane was a blast, and it was cute watching Jimmy trying so hard to flirt with Sabrina. Even Maw-Maw's story worked for me, but I'm gonna need a little more to prove that Cloris Leachman knows what she's doing.
MVP Martha Plimpton owned Virginia's crazy. I don't think I've ever seen someone go from calm to batshit in less than a second like her
Runner-Up Lucas Neff, for making hair eating disturbingly believable.
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