Getting Started. Managing My Account. Troubleshooting an Issue. View All Questions. Ideas Help Shape Hulu. View All Ideas. Community News Get the Latest. Member Recoginition. View All News. Ground Rules. Using the Community. Help Center. Even the posters and billboards around town were stock photos of not even us—just some random wedding cake. Still, by the second half of Happy Endings ' first season and continuing throughout its second, the show that many critics had initially written off as yet another weak pretender to the Friends throne was being lauded as one of the best comedies on TV.
Its cancellation is still lamented, but the show has recently found new life on Hulu, which has the full run available to stream. On its surface, Happy Endings has a pretty standard premise: It's a single-camera comedy about six beautiful, mostly white and somethings in a big city who are all navigating work and relationships while still finding time to spend inordinate amounts of time with one another. It easily could have been just one in a long line of TV comedies that tried to emulate the massive success of Friends but arguably ended up ruining TV comedy.
The show even began with a similar story beat, having one of the female characters run out on her own wedding. Yet it soon became clear that Happy Endings was different.
Through some magic combination of writers, showrunners, and performers, the series managed to expand on the "hangout sitcom" formula, evolving its core characters into fearsomely sharp-witted borderline sociopaths who, despite a collective burden of neuroses and habits that would inspire most people to run away screaming, were somehow still likable.
They have their own slang "amaahhzing" , they know every fact of each other's lives, and their friendships operate under a specific, often cruel set of rules. Witness, for example, "the pile-on," which everyone outside their immediate circle is horrified by:. In this regard especially, Happy Endings takes the usual sitcom formula and curb-stomped it. The main characters aren't just a group of people who spend a lot of time together; they're fiercely co-dependent, utterly insular, and frequently monstrous to each other as well as to outsiders a fact the series' peripheral characters call out often.
Hangout sitcoms live or die by the strength of their casts' chemistry, and by that metric, Happy Endings is near the top of the sitcom food chain. Vox culture editor Todd VanDerWerff argued for the AV Club in that too many sitcoms have an absence of real conflict, which strangles any possibility for real, interesting action.
And it's true that most episodes of Happy Endings conclude with the characters in roughly the same place as they started, like a live-action cartoon that hits the reset button every week. But the show's near-constant return to the status quo is generally obscured by the jokes, which fly so thick and fast — and are so off-kilter, so memorably specific — that episodes crackle with energy despite plots that feature little actual forward movement. As executive producer Joe Russo put it to Complex :.
As we developed it, we just kept pushing the pace and trying to make the jokes faster and faster. It's something we learned from Mitchell Hurwitz when we worked on Arrested Development. He used to say, "Let's have so many jokes that we can throw half of them away," and that was always our motto.
None of the show's plot lines are exactly earth-shattering — Dave and Alex's tumultuous relationship is probably the biggest source of conflict that lasts for more than an episode. But its simple stories resulted in a metric ton of weirdness — plots like Max and Alex staging an "in-ter-Veention" or is it "interventVeen"?
The next generation of bubbly Save time, money, and ultimately help save the planet by forgoing your La Croix. It took the show much of the first season to get a handle on Alex, and arguably Dave never entirely recovered from his uneven introduction.
The food truck might have created a direct continuity error, but character development that was ultimately compromised. After announcing their divorce in the first episode, their narrative in the season is a gradual adaptation to their new situation, and being both single people and parents following this major life change. Sign out. Previous Next Show Grid. Previous Next Hide Grid. If you're new to the show, here's how to look like you were a fan from the beginning.
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