Summary
Poppa’s House finally acknowledges a romantic connection between Poppa and Ivy, while Junior’s parenting style brings the laughs (a bit).
Poppa’s House finally acknowledges the potential of a romantic relationship between Poppa and Ivy, which is the good news – that’s clearly where the show has been heading since it began, and “Disciplinarian” gets us a step closer to that. But the bad news is that it’s the margins of an episode about Junior’s parenting that isn’t especially funny or interesting.
Despite the fact that we’ve had previous episodes featuring Trey and this hasn’t come up before, it turns out he calls his father “Damon” and is just generally an awfully disrespectful little brat. And Junior is ill-equipped to deal with this because his parenting style is too much musical theatre and not enough discipline.
Poppa is the opposite, was raised to call his own father “Sir” and nothing else, and brought up Junior the same way. So, when he agrees to help, what that really means is bugging Junior’s house with surveillance cameras and monitoring his encounters with Trey.
By anyone’s standards, Damon’s too soft, but “Disciplinarian” takes a couple of weird turns that muddle whatever it’s trying to say about this subject. At first, I thought that we were building to Junior’s approach being, in a roundabout way, the right one. When he and Poppa clash and he reveals that he resents his father for how much he was made to fear him as a child, it felt like we were entering some interesting territory.
And Poppa does have a think about this. He confides in Ivy, naturally, and he later tries to justify it to Junior by explaining that, because of his separation from Catherine, he had to be the bad guy. But confusingly Junior starts implementing some of Poppa’s advice at home and it just works, no questions asked. So, that’s a little weird. Who is the show trying to get behind here?
I don’t suppose it matters. This is a sitcom and it’ll likely all be forgotten about next week. What will carry over, hopefully, is the increasing romantic tension between Poppa and Ivy, which is finally acknowledged in Poppa’s House Episode 5. It starts with Poppa mentioning to Junior that he thinks Ivy has been giving him “the eyes”, but there’s a later exchange that seems to make the idea more explicit. I definitely think this is where we’re heading, and I also think that the show will be able to mine some more effective comedy from that premise.
Hopefully, anyway.
