Summary
Single Parents remains a funny look at raising kids in “Sleepover Ready”, which cleverly reverses the needs of the children and their parents.
This recap of Single Parents Season 1 Episode 2, “Sleepover Ready”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Single Parents continues to be fun and funny while maintaining its likable ridiculousness in the second episode, “Sleepover Ready”, which uses the dreaded first-time sleepover as a backdrop for looking at the anxieties of the generally useless titular guardians.
It’s the turn of Douglas (Brad Garrett, perfectly cast) to watch the kids over the weekend, which he naturally resents, as it interferes with his macho loner routine. He’s an alluring figure to Will (Taran Killam), who would like very much to be his friend, even though his daughter, Sophie (Marlow Barkley), would prefer him to stop embarrassingly prostrating himself at the feet of the nearest manly man. (Needless to say the on-going joke of both “Sleepover Ready” and Single Parents in general is that Douglas isn’t manly at all.)
Angie (Leighton Meester, still gorgeously charming) has trouble with the sleepover concept, because her son, Graham (Tyler Wladis), gets separation anxiety, reliably leaving her with only an hour or so to spend with her new fling before he calls needing to be picked up. Luckily, in the ever-confident company of Sophie, he feels he can last the night, meaning that perhaps his mother’s boyfriend can, too. It’s the recurring theme of Single Parents made explicit: Here are these adults who, thanks to their kids, have to relearn what it feels like to be independent.
For help deciding whether or not to confront her intimacy issues, Angie turns to Poppy (Kimrie Lewis), who has issues of her own – namely, she’s successful enough to give out a rent-free room to Miggy (Jake Choi), who is so useless and irresponsible and, yes, childlike, that he needs mothering too. (He eventually gets a job in Poppy’s upscale feminist wine bar, but more on that in the next episode.)
During their painfully awkward attempts at bonding, Will and Douglas lose the children. Panicking, the parents amass to search the golf course on which Douglas lives, where they discover the kids – including Graham – fast asleep. Progress! Naturally, though, the sprinklers go off, meaning the excursion is derailed. But there’s a friendship made out of the affair, and it turns out that Graham constantly tipping people to look the other way is an endlessly funny gag. Will approves, too.
