COUGAR TOWN: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON

I can't even believe how much I hated Cougar Town.  It's a DISNEY show and it offended me.  All the characters are kind of ridiculous people and nothing is taken seriously. Oh, ha ha, forty-year-old mom gives blow job to a twenty-two-year-old pick-up and then her son walks in on it.  Hee hee hee.  And then she goes to eat a banana the next day and her son says, "No more of that for you." Oh ho ho. 

 

Um, hello?  Nobody likes a parent doing that kind of crap in their house, and more often than not it creates other problems that interfere with the family environment.  Under all the breezy humor, the show's message is really kind of horrible: it's okay to be selfish and indulgent if you're a single mom because you deserve it!  Well no, actually your first responsibility is to your kid and if you're not okay with that eighteen year commitment you made, then maybe you shouldn't have gotten pregnant in the first place.  Okay, here's the thing, AT LEAST TAKE IT OUT OF THE HOUSE.  Go blow your new boy toy at his place! 

 

At the start of the show, Jules Cobb (Courteney Cox) has been divorced for five months.  Though only forty years old, she's reached an age where it becomes difficult to start over.  The dating pool can be limited and undesirable, and people can be exceedingly judgmental about who and what you do.  Like, why is it okay for Jules' newly divorced neighbor to parade a string of hot young women through his bachelor pad?  She could never get away with that!  The double standard makes her so mad that she can barely control herself, regularly heckling her neighbor and sometimes attempting bodily harm. 

 

Clearly these two are going to wind up together, but in the meantime, Jules abandons her quiet evenings of red wine and Scrabble and heads out for a night on the town with her younger and less inhibited friend and coworker, Laurie (Busy Philipps).  Before you know it, our Jules is out cougarin' with the best of them, tumbling into bed with a much, much younger man, and getting caught servicing him on the patio. 

 

Of course her son Travis, roughly seventeen years old, takes everything in stride because it's funnier that way.    He views his parents with the eye-rolling tolerance of someone who is used to being the mature one in a house full of clueless adults...or of someone who is not a seventeen year old, but plays one on TV.  His father (Brian Van Holt) stumbles through life with cheerful hillbilly abandon, making him an even less credible parental unit than Jules.  Though their pairing works as a comedic device, it's hard to imagine how Jules (now a successful real estate agent) ever hooked up with a man who would cackle with white trash glee while mowing the lawn at his son's school.  Jules' dear friends and neighbors, Ellie (Christa Miller) and Andy (Ian Gomez), offer up a functional example of marriage, although Ellie and Laurie certainly don't serve as functional friends.  Their weird bickering feels like another comedic device rather than something true to life.  The characters in Cougar Town aren't bad people, but it's hard to see them being likable in the real world.  Just as their actions don't translate to real life consequences, they don't entirely feel like real people.

I certainly don't consider myself a prude, but I do take issue with irresponsibility played for laughs.  At the height of the AIDS crisis, even James Bond had to embrace monogamy.  Are we now going to pretend that being careful is no longer necessary?  Wouldn't it suck if Jules' good time ended in a raging case of herpes...or worse?  Moreover, much of the comedy relies on innuendo or a childishly placed reference to sex or body parts.  Though the show becomes slightly more grounded as Season 1 progresses, it would be nice to see more of the heart these characters so clearly possess.  The premise leaves plenty of room for exploration, so there's really no need to watch a cartoonish cast of characters sitting around and saying, "Huh huh. Huh huh. You said butt."  That, I believe, has been done before. 

 

 

Extra features include bloopers, deleted scenes, Jimmy Kimmel Live's "Saber-Tooth Tiger Town", a featurette on "Taming Cougar Town", an "Ask Barb" segment, and "Strokin' it With Bobby Cobb" music video.