Episode Report Card Aaron: B | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Death in the Family
By Aaron | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 06.02.2001
Well, at least it looks like Peter finally got the ride he was really looking for. Rachel is bringing him to the morgue because he's "in no shape to drive," and also because she wants to avoid her family's "annual Christmas Eve massacre." She reads off her list of familial woes, which includes bickering parents, a manic-depressive brother, and an incontinent springer-spaniel. Peter gives the bullet on his family members, neatly tying up all our exposition to date: Mom and David are control freaks and Claire is wild. Got it? Good. He rails against the unfairness that his father -- who never had so much as a speeding ticket -- should die in a car accident. "Are you mad at him, or the fact that we're all going to die?" probes Brenda, causing Peter to wonder whether she's a psychiatrist. She emphatically denies that notion, stating, "No. God no. Both my parents were." Despite the obvious age issue, and for no other reason than the fact that it amuses me greatly, I like to pretend that Richard and Dr. Melfi are her parents. We never actually see them, so it kind of works. Plus, those two even already have the at-least-manic-and- quite-possibly-depressive son. In a perhaps fortunate bid to change the subject, she asks, "So what else do you want to talk about? The weather, or the fact that we both just fucked a perfect stranger, and that we both lied when we said we never did that?"
Viewing room. David stands and greets various guests, all of whom seem to be congratulating him for putting on a good show. I'm just going to be up front and honest here, and admit that in much the same way that my lack of knowledge of New Jersey may have hindered my Sopranos recaps, my lack of a foundation in funeral etiquette may pose a problem here. See, Jewish funerals are always closed-casket, take place within twenty-four hours of death, and are usually over in about fifteen minutes. It's all very quick and (again, pardon the unfortunate pun) bloodless, and most of the mourning takes place afterward back at the home. I've never been to a non-Jewish funeral, so I'm left to wonder whether the scenes on this show are really indicative of how the other half dies. Jessica Mitford, here I come. And also here comes that hoary old standby shorthand for "everyone look and see how tightly wound this character is": the fake-scream take. David lets out a yelp, and then we cut right back to him with the bereaved as if nothing had happened.
Meanwhile, in the Lean Green Corpse Machine, Claire is driving Mom to the morgue. Mom tries to make small talk, but Claire can't handle it and complains, "You're kind of freaking me out right now." Lauren Ambrose, by the way, does a great job of playing a girl on the worst trip ever. Mom pauses for a minute, and then because it's Alan's world and we're just watching it, she takes this opportunity to ask the questions that you just know her daughter doesn't want to hear right now: "Claire, are you having sex? Are you doing drugs?" "Why are you asking me this right now?" wonders a guilty-looking Claire, and Mom says it's because she can't remember the last time they talked about anything important. "I need to know you're okay," she finishes, but Claire fails miserably in her stammered attempts to say that she is.
Cut back to David, still at a funeral. A girl I don't care about enough to actually look up her name (but whom I do remember from when she was on Working with Fred Savage ["It's Dina Spybey. She was in the U.S. Men Behaving Badly and SubUrbia; Arden Myrin is probably the one you're thinking of, from Working." -- Wing Chun]) comes over and starts bantering with him about all the various funerals she's attended. Here, Alan Ball somehow manages to wring laughs from the phrase "pediatric leukemia." As the this girl babbles and flirts, her voice is over-dubbed with her saying, "Now that your father is dead, you can forget about ever going to law school. It's just you, and dead people, and freaks like me for the rest of your life." David lets out another scream, which this time turns out to be real, and I'll give Alan Ball half his points back for stepping on the fake-scream take I had cracked on a few paragraphs back.