Summary
“Beyoncé Circa Lemonade” can feel a little meandering and repetitive, but it still contains the nuggets of truth that make Single Parents worthwhile.
Ah, sleep training – I remember the days. There’s nothing worse than listening to your child scream like a banshee for most of the night, and repeat that every night for seemingly forever, until they blessedly, finally learn to fall asleep on their own. So I immediately felt for Miggy (Jake Choi) in “Beyoncé Circa Lemonade” when he turned up looking like an extra from The Walking Dead and announced, naively, that he still snuggles his kid at night. Bah, I thought. You rookie!
Then again we were all rookies at some point, which is probably why the other parents are so eager to help him out. Angie (Leighton Meester) believes she can sleep train baby Jack in one night, but admittedly it’s a rash response to Douglas (Brad Garrett) insisting that women are no good at it. The terms? If she can do it, she gets to root around through the samples at Doug’s dermatology office. (“Ah, the closet of youth. Who do you think you are, Jenny Aniston?”) But if she can’t, she has to chaperone the field trip that Doug has just been saddled with.
In the meantime, Poppy (Kimrie Lewis), increasingly the only voice of reason, endeavours to help Will (Taran Killam) work through his anger over his ex-wife a) leaving, and b) failing to visit Sophie (Marlow Barkley) on a regular basis. His current solution is baking (“Please tell me there are drugs in these”), which obviously isn’t cutting it. Her solution: Volleyball, which works surprisingly well, mostly because Taran Killam absolutely kills it here. It turns out that if you’re feeling like “Beyoncé Circa Lemonade”, the best solution is to abuse a volunteer referee.
While Angie miserably fails at sleep training baby Jake, Miggy miserably fails at looking after the older kids, who arrange to have a party instead. (“You’re basically our age. We like you, but we don’t respect you.”) The theme here – it seems as always – is Graham (Tyler Wladis) learning to embrace his sensitivity. Doug, meanwhile, is learning the same thing, as Angie catches him in the act of his “masculine” sleep training routine, which is just like hers.
Of the takeaways here, some feel trite and repetitive. Yes, we get it; it’s fine to be emotional. Good, even. But there’s something Doug says that rings especially true, which is that no matter how hard you try to make your kids think and behave a particular way, ultimately they’re only ever going to be who they are. It’s nuggets like that which make Single Parents worthwhile and consistently enjoyable, and particularly well-suited to those of us who have been and continue to be there.
