QuaranTV Check-In is a series where the television staff of ThePopBreak.com recommends shows for you to binge during this time of quarantine, social distancing, and shelter at home. In these columns we will be combining laugh out loud comedies with engrossing dramas. Enjoy. Stay Healthy. Stay Safe.
Happy Endings (ABC 2011-2013)
Written by Bill Bodkin
There’s rarely a sitcom these days you can watch where you find yourself not only losing yourself in laughter, but quoting it for days, weeks, months, and even years on end. Happy Endings is that type of show.
The show, which aired from 2011-2013 on ABC, was a sublimely surreal subversion of the typical “bunch of friends” sitcom — which is ironic because that’s exactly what the show started out as. The series premise was initially about the fall out of the engagement between thrift shop owner Alex (Elisha Cuthbert, 24) and Dave (Zachary Knight, Magnum PI) and how their friends — corporate couple Jane (Eliza Coupe, Future Man) and Brad (Damon Wayans Jr., New Girl), eternally single gal Penny (Casey Wilson, Black Monday) and their loafish gay friend Max (Adam Pally, Indebted) — would handle it.
Before you could say ah-mahzing, the show abandoned the concept and hyper-focused on the bizarre quirks of the group — Jane’s obsessive controlling behavior, Alex’s penchant for food, Brad’s fastidiousness, Penny’s hopeless romanticism, Dave’s wide-eyed idealism, and Max’s perpetual laziness.
This creative decision made by show runner David Caspe (Wilson’s husband and creator of Black Monday), and producers The Russo Brothers (yes, those Russo Brothers), took a stale sitcom and turned into a cult phenomenon filled to the brim with the most insane sitcom situations ever created (from Dave’s “Steak Me Home Tonight” food truck to Max and Brad’s fierce competition as Bar Mitzvah hosts), and bizarrely quotable lines like (“You asked about my mom’s hystero-recto!”).
While this series doesn’t have the name value of binge staples like The Office, Parks and Rec or Friends — this is the type of series with which, once you start, you will instantly fall in love. It’s a silly show that consumes your day with belly laughs and wiping tears from your eyes, and who doesn’t need that right now?
Happy Endings is available on Hulu, and Amazon Prime.
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