Initially, “Employee of the Month” appears to be existing in the shadow of last week’s Playing House, aligning itself as a Mark-heavy half hour of emoting and healing. Given Keegan-Michael Key’s general restrain in the role of Mark the police officer, it’s no surprise “Employee of the Month” uses this opportunity to let Key excise some of his comedic energy. What is surprising is what happens when all the physical comedy is gone and Mark is out of frame, with the episode becoming a poignant story about Maggie finding her path in life.
That’s not to say the Mark material isn’t great. It serves the narrative purpose of bringing him and Emma ever so closely together, throwing immediate shade on her relationship with Dan and revisiting the chemistry between them we were beginning to see at the end of the first season. Though the blueprint for a story like this is pretty obvious, Playing House has such strong performers behind the material that it carries otherwise perfunctory scenes like the two of them (badly faking) playing video games and getting flirtatiously touchy on the couch, letting their improv abilities carry the scene where the script (and laughably bad video game CGI – they’re playing the same twenty frames of a one-player game the whole time!) is found lacking.
Until Playing House wiggles out of this Emma/Dan situation, Mark and Emma’s story is stuck in a bit of a holding pattern; thankfully, Maggie (and Lennon Parham’s wonderful performance) is here to pick up the slack. Working a part-time job at Rosie’s (next to Cindy and her voluptuous figure) turns out not to be such a satisfying endeavor for Maggie, especially after she wins Employee of the Month and has to face the possible reality of working there for the foreseeable future, doing the Birthday Dance every day and wishing she had made a better career choice at some point in life.
A show so focused on personal stories, Playing House hasn’t spent a lot of time on the professional lives of Maggie and Emma – particularly Maggie, since Emma’s stories are always able to function as a passing punchline about stressful work life and/or exaggerated Japanese business practices. Maggie’s always been a bit of a cypher when it comes to her career path, until Maggie tells her friend at the hospital where Mark’s being treated that she was thinking about going back to nursing school. Like a loose thread on a sweater, Playing House pulls that little nugget of information and expounds on it in a fascinating way. At some point in her adult life, Maggie had left Pinebrook’s idyllic suburbia, only returning to help take care of her father after her mother passed away. While taking care of him, she began going to nursing school, falling a semester short when her father died, and life steered her away from her dream job, where she could help people in ways she could never have helped her parents.
That shot of pathos to Maggie’s character is something Playing House never really needed, but it gives such amazing breadth to her character and the journey she’s been on the past few years of her life, it’s immediately one of the most important, rewarding moments of the show. It both provides color to what Maggie’s life was before Char Bar and marriage, filling out another component of Playing House‘s rich backstory, and giving her character a definitive arc across the show’s first (and hopefully not only) two seasons.
The Maggie-centric scenes of “Employee of the Month” turns a solid episode into something more, mirroring last week’s shift from slapstick to emotional in the third act, topped off with a hilarious, heartwarming moment of Maggie crying, ashamed to ask Emma to make another set of sacrifices to help her further her own life. Who knew Playing House could be so poignant? “Employee of the Month” is another fine example of the show’s growth in its sophomore season, doubling down on the loose nature of the show’s joke structure and its attempts to tell meaningful stories about its core characters.
[Photo via USA Network]
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