Summary
Poppa’s House has almost no positive qualities in Episode 12, repeating the same tired jokes and structure.
Pardon my ignorance, but I thought a slumber party was something teenage girls did. Perhaps that’s true and Junior is just regressing even further into his default state of unevolved moron in the absence of his wife, who is sadly elsewhere for Episode 12 of Poppa’s House, only cameoing briefly via FaceTime to let Spanish musician Charo get two seconds of airtime. If you’re wondering whose benefit that was for, so am I. So is everyone.
As is probably obvious from the title, the gimmick of this episode is that Junior is hosting a family sleepover that he wants Poppa to attend, but because Poppa is a grumpy curmudgeon, he assumes he won’t want to. So, he concocts various schemes to con Poppa into wanting to attend, including deliberately not inviting him.
You can’t even blame Poppa at this point. I wouldn’t want to spend any time with Junior either. But true to form Junior doesn’t intuit that he’s the problem and theatrically arrives at Poppa’s house – I never noticed before, but they literally live across the street from one another?! – to invite Ivy instead of his father. Ivy accepts the invitation, but Poppa knows what’s up and continues feigning disinterest, waiting on an official invitation before he even raises the issue.
This, I kid you not, is the only joke of the episode. There’s literally nothing else to it except for a guest-starring distant relative whose sole characteristic is telling long-winded stories, which isn’t funny the first time and doesn’t become so by the fourth or fifth try.
Why does everyone in this show act this way? You can write a sitcom without turning every character into a child. Episode 12 is, like basically every episode of Poppa’s House, built on extremely petty nonsense that’d be so easy to resolve it scarcely seems worth the effort of building an episode around it. And the fact that almost every concept now seems to be determined to rope in every supporting character – JJ and Catherine are at the slumber party – makes them turning up less special. They’re just becoming part of the furniture.
As is becoming commonplace now, Poppa’s reticence to spend time with anyone, even his own family, is explained away as a consequence of long-ago trauma. In this case, he was teased as a child for having a club foot, so Junior not inviting him to the slumber party reopened old wounds. But Poppa knew that Junior was only not inviting him so he’d want to go, so this makes no sense at all, and at no point did Poppa exhibit any genuine interest in being there or frustration at not being invited, even performatively. Poppa’s House can’t even keep its characterization straight.
There’s just nothing to like here. The few positive elements – namely Poppa’s burgeoning relationship with Ivy – seem to have been completely abandoned in favor of clumsy slapstick and arch, reiterative nonsense. Even by this show’s low standards, things are getting very grim indeed.
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