Cougar Town Review: Let's Just Be Friends
Nick McHatton at . Updated at .It’s time to let Friends go.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the show, and if there’s a marathon on TBS I will likely sit down and watch it for hours. That said, Matthew Perry on Cougar Town Season 5 Episode 2 was a bit of a letdown.
His character, Sam, didn’t fit well within the universe and the story tried too hard to bring back the chemistry and situations we know and love with Monica and Chandler, just with a Cougar Town-type spin.
Jules and Sam share the same easy chemistry that Courteney and Matt have had for years, but, again, there’s just something that is off about the entire situation.
Sure, Jules switching to paperless billing to help save the planet of tree murder is very Jules, and so is Jules playing along with Sam’s marriage proposal, coffee date - and even meeting the family is entirely within the realm of Jules' possibilities.
The biggest problem arose with only having Perry for one episode: the entire installment was just a race to the finish. Maybe that was part of the joke, but it was all just rushing from one plot point to the next.
Had Perry gotten the Lisa Kudrow or Jennifer Aniston treatment with a rather different character, then everything might have fallen in place a bit better. It’s unfortunate Cougar Town Season 5 decided to try rekindling a bit of Friends magic instead of doing something unique and original, like prior Friends had the opportunity to do. What we got this time around was a rushed Chandler Bing.
Thankfully, the comedy was still in place elsewhere. Ellie attempting to find the one lie to bring down all of Laurie’s crazy and wild stories is very typical Ellie. She’s just bored enough to do an exhaustive search to mess with her Jellybean, but just nice enough to find at least one story that truly does pan out for her Jellybean (and she didn’t even see Laurie naked).
Did the “Matteney” reunion live up to your hype?
