Summary
The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins works on Reggie and Arthur’s relationship in “Put It On Your Cabbage”, as the two realise they have more in common than they first realised.
I can’t say that Arthur Tobin’s film about — all together now — The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins will be any good, but in Episode 3, “Put It On Your Cabbage!”, it’s starting to look like they both might at least learn something about each other and themselves through making it. After how Reggie has taken to being filmed thus far, even that seems like major progress. And while they’re hogging the limelight, even Monica and Brina might be developing a much more meaningful relationship. As for Rusty, nobody is paying much attention to him yet. But at least he’s hearing things better.
This outing adopts a much more classic sitcom A- and B-plot structure, which it settles into with great confidence but, sadly, notably fewer of the absurd cutaways (there’s only one big one here, which reveals Reggie made a Universal Monsters equivalent of Space Jam back in his heyday). This is nonetheless an important juncture in any sitcom’s run, though, since it’s the point where the characters really start to bed in and, more importantly, the audience actually starts to like them in their different configurations.
In the A-plot, for instance, Arthur is getting frustrated with Reggie’s shut-in routine, spending every day sitting around binge-watching network TV to the extent that he doesn’t even know what day it is (Arthur is beginning to drop the “tortured uptight British auteur” routine, but his “this is anathema to my method” line when he’s trying to get Reggie off the couch is still gold). As it happens, Reggie has a pretty good reason for avoiding the outside world — everyone hates him and habitually abuses him whenever they see him. Not much is made of it, but I felt a real pang of sadness when it was revealed that he doesn’t even attend Reggie’s football games because of the abundance of Jets fans, and instead, they rewatch the footage together after the fact.
For the sake of his film, Arthur tries to get Reggie out and about. But once he discovers that his own meltdown on the set of that Marvel-alike movie has hit the mainstream and gone viral, he begins to see the method in Reggie’s madness. Pretty soon, he’s sat on the same couch, enjoying the same junk procedural TV. Reggie spots an opportunity to prove his point by forcing Arthur to attend a documentary film festival at the Lincoln Centre, hoping the ordeal will make it clearer why Reggie goes three hours out of his way to buy bread from an Amish village. But it ends up being a pretty major moment for them both. Sure, it’s wildly hostile, but Reggie decides to tough it out, and since Arthur needs to follow him around for filming purposes, he has no choice but to do the same.
Meanwhile in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins Episode 3, Reggie is out of an endorsement for a herring spread, since the company has decided not to renew the contract. Nobody is especially concerned about this except Monica, who knows that his money has to come from somewhere. It’s not a huge surprise that Monica is struggling, though. Reggie’s career was torpedoed a long time ago, and her assistant, Ashley, is completely useless. She only hired her because she was a nepo baby, but now she can’t remember who her parents are, so it’s too risky to fire her.
To blow off some steam, Monica accompanies Brina — and Rusty, for some reason, who has such an abundance of wax in his ears that he spends the first half of the episode only pretending to hear what anyone is saying — but this only raises more issues. It seems like Brina is living an incredibly lavish lifestyle on Reggie’s disappearing dime, and Monica tries to politely accuse her of being a gold digger. This backfires, though, since it turns out Brina makes her own money as an influencer, and most of the indulgences she enjoys have been provided by brands she’s working with.
Hilariously, Monica can’t quite understand why, if Brina’s successful, she would be with Reggie (you know, her ex-husband and father of her children). But Brina seems to see something charming in Reggie’s uncomplicated essential character, which helps to characterise him for us, too. Almost as an apology, Monica helps Brina negotiate a brand deal for some probiotic toilet roll. Perhaps she’ll be making some money in the absence of the herring spread after all.
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