Suburgatory - Season 2 (1 Viewer)

[Adam Lenhardt]

"Suburgatory" was pretty hit-and-miss with me during the first season. I thought a lot of the satire missed, but the bizarre world of Chatswin sucked me in enough to keep watching. But I thought tonight's season premiere was pretty fantastic.
Series creator Emily Kapnek got her start writing for "Parks & Recreation", a show with a very iffy first season that blossomed into something fantastic by finding its heart.
The mystery of Tessa's mother, a punchline for most of the first season, had a really grounding force in this season premiere. With all of the crazy stuff swirling around them, the show's strongest when it takes George and Tessa's relationship seriously. And then the reveal of what Tessa's mom's song was at the end at the talent show was just perfectly executed. Even the stuff with the Shays has evolved into something compelling, with Lisa's never-ending and futile war against her mother. I hope the rest of the season shows the same kind of improvement.

 

[Stan]

I've really enjoyed this show. A very unique, yet bizarre comedy set in fantasyland Chatswin, a world of shallow, self-absorbed rich people. I have kind of a love/hate feeling towards most of the characters, but it is entertaining.
Never even knew there was a backstory to Tessa's mother, I always assumed she had died or divorced George, then George and Tessa moved to Chatswin, guess I'lll have to pay a little more attention in the future.
Haven't seen this new episode yet, but sounds like it will be enjoyable.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Hope you've had a chance to watch the premiere, Stan. If you haven't, you might want to wait to read the rest of this post until you have.

Never even knew there was a backstory to Tessa's mother, I always assumed she had died or divorced George, then George and Tessa moved to Chatswin, guess I'lll have to pay a little more attention in the future.

Most of the first season, Tessa and George joked about what a non-entity she was in their lives. But then Tessa writes a poem for her English class about the absence of her mother in an attempt to win over the hipster teacher that maddeningly prefers Dalia, and in the "Independence Day" episode, George reads it and becomes concerned. He ends up reaching out to Tessa's maternal grandmother Helen to try and get in touch with Tessa's mom. There was that really tense scene between them in the diner, where it becomes clear something really awful (but unspecified) happened when Tessa was a baby. Helen blames George for taking her daughter's baby away, while we understand that Tessa's mom was in a really bad place and George was left alone with a young baby to pick up the pieces. And then of course Helen finally met Tessa in the season finale.
In the premiere, we find out George let her spend the entire summer in Manhattan living with her grandmother. She mainly used the summer as an excuse to dive into her old lifestyle -- which no longer entirely fit -- but while there she finds a photo of her mother holding her as a baby, and a cassette tape of a song her mother recorded. We go through the whole episode with Tessa deciding whether to perform it at the Chatswin talent show.
Finally, with a little push from George, she does.
And the song her mother wrote is the theme song of the show, which until now had only been a 15-second ditty. But Tessa sings the first verse, and the lyrics that make it clear what the song was written about:
"Against a woolen sweater that was blue,
that's all that I remember of you.
Before you learned to walk, I learned to run;
guess the ants really go marching one by one.
When a train rolls in,
the doors open I get in.
Last night I had a pleasant nightmare na na na, na na na..."
It's a song Tessa's mom wrote to the daughter she'd only held as a baby, about the experience of abandoning her. The show took something shallow and obvious and gave it poignancy and depth.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The last 30 seconds of tonight's episode were the biggest "aw!" moment of the entire TV season for me.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Alan Tudyk and Rex Lee dropped from "Suburgatory" cast for season three due to budget cuts

The show's third season will also be 13 episodes instead of 22.

Of all the cast members, they're the ones I would have cut, too. As much as I'm a huge fan of Alan Tudyk, his character never evolved much from the broad caricature he was in the beginning. Same with Rex Lee's gay guidance counselor.