Raising Hope - season 1 thread

Actually, the baby's mother...

It was a good episode for a start. Probably the only new fall show I'll continue to watch. Though it's a little distracting that mother, father, and son all appear to be nearly the same age.

My favorite pilot so far this year. Pitch perfect from beginning to end. It was strongly implied that this show takes place in the same universe as "My Name is Earl", but the stakes are a lot more personal. Loved the entire cast, and the prison sequence had my jaw on the floor.

As for the parents, Martha Plimpton is 40 and Garret Dillahunt is 46. Since her character had Jimmy when she was fifteen, that would make him 25 and that seems about right.

My wife and I thought it was hilarious.  Definitely added to DVR schedule.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patrick Sun 

I thought it was slow to get going, but once the baby shows up, the show found some footing and humanized an otherwise white-trash family (along the lines of "My Name is Earl", not surprisingly considering Greg Garcia created this show).

It always amuses me that shows about working-class families have been ghetto-ized into a subgenre in the last decade or so, considering that there are far more families out there like this one than there are like the family in "Modern Family" (much as I love that show). Speaking of his taxi cab driver father and blue-collar extended family, series creator Greg Garcia had a great retort: “I’m just more drawn to those characters than your ‘Frasiers’ and ‘Friends’ of the world,” he said. “Not that those aren’t great shows. I’m just more drawn to the other half of the world — the other 90 percent of the world.”

I liked this for the most part but mostly near the end.    I am attracted to this sort of story rather than the "Friends" and "Frasiers" too but I found that the show teetered too close to cloying about the "stupid white trash" model.   The humor was much better when the characters seemed more genuine.  That said, I loved CLoris Leachman's part in this.  It was crazy dark and funny.  I love that they are essentially grifters living off what little the lady has left and hoping for less moments of lucidity on her part.  Awesome.  I love this cast overall... always liked Plimpton (an actress who is always busy but never gets a lot of notice, sadly...) and Dillahunt since his awesome dual roles in DEADWOOD.     It is fun to see him in comedy.

Will see how this plays out.   It could be one-note and the baby-endangerment (the rolling in the backseat was funny  but also a bit too close to reality for me...ugh...maybe it is my parent role that creeps in from time to time) can only be so funny before I get weirded out by it.   We will have to see.

I finally caught it, and it's one of the best, most fully realized pilots I've ever seen.  More a short film than a sitcom, Raising Hope is so dense and covers so much ground that it's an instant DVR entry.  My Name is Earl was one of my favorite shows for the first three seasons -- it started losing steam about the time Earl went to prison, and I never watched most of the last season because it seemed to be spinning its wheels and I had better things to do.  But the pilot was amazing, perhaps the best pilot I've ever seen -- I watched it five or six times before the show even aired on a promo DVD NBC had mailed out.  Raising Hope is in that class.

It also doesn't hurt that I love the cast -- Shannon Woodward from The Riches, Garret Dillahunt and Martha Plimpton are great, and wow, is Kelly Heyer (young Virginia) cute or what?  Greg Binkley is a carry over from the Earl cast, and I can't forget Cloris Leachman.

The shot where the young Jimmy stuck his head through the bottom of the car, inches from the pavement as it was speeding down the road was the funniest thing I've seen all week. 

Great show! Definitely one I plan on adding to my lineup. Watched the pilot on Hulu and laughed the entire episode. Good stuff.

Second episode wasn't as rapid-fire as the pilot, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it. The antics around the house reminded me of "Malcolm in the Middle" in its prime, and the introduction of Sabrina's boyfriend helps set up a conflict to drive the show. The doorway scene said it all, with Jimmy's mother running through increasingly slim lines of hope for Jimmy and then finally reaching the point where she throws in the towel on his chances and decides to have a good time. The boyfriend has Jimmy beat in every conceivable way on paper; everything Sabrina learns about Jimmy's life seems to embarrass him further. And yet, at the end, when Sabrina and her boyfriend are playing beer pong in the backyard, Jimmy's being a father to his little girl. At that moment, I'd be willing to argue that Jimmy's the better long term investment (even if he'll never offer the better lifestyle).

Also, the Gooch!

Still my favorite new show. Everything with Jimmy's parents is absolute gold, and I really love the supermarket scenes as well. Jimmy may be extremely ignorant, but he's trying to improve himself. Sabrina is educated, sarcastic and witty; the type of person who was previously completely outside Jimmy's sphere of understanding. Jimmy started as a spectacle to her, grade-A people watching ripe for mocking. But he keeps surprising her, to the point where it's her eyes watching him walk away instead of vice-versa at the end of this episode. He makes her feel better about herself, and that's a very attractive quality to find in another person.

They get some great expressions from the baby. The look they spliced in as Jimmy's Mom wrote "Dork" on his face was priceless! 

Love this show. It's quickly rising to the top of my favorites, and is definitely the best new comedy this season.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malcolm R 

They get some great expressions from the baby. The look they spliced in as Jimmy's Mom wrote "Dork" on his face was priceless! 

That shot was hilarious. It's not too often you read "Who are these people?" on a baby's face. My favorite expression last night had to be Cloris Leachman's look of determination as she prepared to Jenga the hoarding shed while "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" plays in the background.

First new show to get a full season pickup.

http://www.deadline.com/2010/10/fox-gives-raising-hope-back-order/

You just made my night, Matt!

This episode was losing me a bit until Virginia's speech to Burt about why getting the family portrait right was so important to her. One of the things I like about this show is that the characters are a lot more introspective than the characters on "My Name is Earl". The characters on that show were poor, but the poverty was always used as a punchline. This working class family is poor, and feels poor. Sabrina sees the good things we see, but they're too caught up in the flaws she reflects back at them.

One thing I like is how the episodes end with a monologue from Jimmy to Hope, which sort of remind me of J.D.'s closing monologues on the early seasons of "Scrubs" but have more weight because they're a father's life lessons to his daughter.

This show strikes all of the right notes.

I've always loved Martha Plimpton. It was genius to cast her as the mother.

I think they're repeating the first episode tonight if anyone missed it when it premiered.

This is the show I look forward to most all week. Great hour of television, with the Halloween episode focused on Jimmy and Sabrina, and the second half hour focused on the parenting side of things. Everything about the baby momma's prison videos was hilarious. The kiss between Jimmy and Sabrina -- with Sabrina drunk enough to think she was kissing Wyatt -- was a great way to stoke those fires, especially since Jimmy's apparently a better kisser. Wyatt's essentially Warehouse Roy in this scenario. The hug Jimmy gave his father when Burt came running up with the baby was very well done. We've just had this kiss between Jimmy and Sabrina, but then in that moment you see how much Jimmy is a parent first. I was waiting for Burt to have brought back the wrong baby, only for them to reveal something many times crazier. The second half hour had less laughs, but really dug into the family drama in a touching way. I like that we get to watch Jimmy stumble upon the building blocks that will make him a great father.

I love this show, too.  The scene where Jimmy is comforting Hope during the thunderstorm was great. Almost makes me wish I had kids...almost.

And just in the nick of time, we find out there's more baby food in the pantry.

I loved that Burt was scaring Jimmy every Halloween just so he could get big hugs.

Absolutey loved the song at the beginning; damn that kid is cute   

This has become my favorite show. For all the laughs in last night's episode, it was about two fathers trying to do the selfless thing for their children. Jimmy and Burt are ignorant, but they're making the sacrifices necessary for their children. It's nice to have this half-hour every week about a family that loves one another, for all of their quirks.

By giving Jimmy the part time bagging job, they also avoid having to come up with lots of contrivances to create scenes between him and Sabrina. When they want some Jimmy-Sabrina interaction but don't want to involve her in the "A" plot, they can just cut to Jimmy bagging for her.

That sounds vaguely dirty.

All the better, then.

Didn't Jimmy have a brother in the pilot? I remember 2 guys working along with Jimmy's Dad.

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Originally Posted by Mark_B 

Didn't Jimmy have a brother in the pilot? I remember 2 guys working along with Jimmy's Dad.

He was a cousin, I believe.  Maybe Maw-Maw actually evicted him during a lucid moment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malcolm R 

Maybe Maw-Maw actually evicted him during a lucid moment.

He was written off in episode two in a most memorable fashion:

JIMMY: Hey, where's Mike's tent?  [Burt hands Jimmy a scrap of paper.]

JIMMY (reading): "Guys, met a chick, joined a cult. Later." Again?

VIRGINIA (pulling a clump of hair from the utility sink): I think he's serious this time. He shaved his head. EW! [Throws down the hair] Not just his head.