Although Two Guys and a Girl is one of the undoubted masters of the Halloween episode, its track record with other holiday episodes is much spottier; take season two’s “Two Guys, a Girl and a Thanksgiving”, where Ashley invites her boyfriend to dinner at Pete and Berg’s apartment, causing romantic-tinged chaos for everyone involved, which is succeeded here by “Talking Turkey”, a Thanksgiving episode where… Ashley invites an agent of chaos over to Pete and Berg’s apartment, causing romantic chaos for everyone involved. The result? An episode as depressing, crass, and combative as its predecessor, one that on paper, looks to be an interesting concept (like Frasier‘s “A Miracle on Third or Fourth Street”), but in execution, its narrative is the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for most of its running time – it’s funny enough to drown some of that noise out, but not all of it.
“Talking Turkey” centers all of its action around Chet, the homeless guy that lives in the alley behind the apartment building, who joins Thanksgiving dinner upon Ashley’s invitation (in her roundabout way to piss Berg off, by… making him do something nice for someone?). Putting aside the obvious embarrassingly tone deaf jokes about homeless people the episode makes in the first act, Chet’s only purpose is to stir up shit between the characters it pairs off; Ashley and Berg, Sharon and Johnny, and Irene and Pete (the latter of which seems to exist only to give Pete something to do besides referee the fighting happening around him).
At least with Sharon and Johnny, Two Guys and a Girl is at least offering a story the audience is invested in; ever since they got together in season two, their relationship is constantly being put through a barrage of existential tests, the frequency and intensity of which has only seemed to increase in the post-engagement episodes of season three. Last episode explored their sexual incompatibilities; “Talking Turkey” takes their problems out of the bedroom, but still offers up another fundamental difference in their lives; Johnny’s blue-collar upbringing, and Sharon’s noted recklessness with money (as Chet the homeless guy notes, she treats Gucci garment bags as disposable). This manifests in both the Thanksgiving dinner – with Johnny’s canned cranberries, and secretly substituting chicken for the turkey – and in their living situation, with Sharon vacillating between letting Ashley move in with them or not.
Unfortunately, their socioeconomic values give way to a much sillier plot, when Chet decides to convince everyone that their partners are trying to sleep with other people. He tells Sharon that Ashley’s going to try and sleep with Johnny, that Ashley is pregnant with Berg’s child… oh, and that Irene brought a gun to dinner to shoot Pete with. As a character, Chet is a fun, wild-haired bit of Joker energy to kick up an otherwise tepid episode of couples (and former couples) arguing over petty nonsense (like a less entertaining version of Cheers‘ “Thanksgiving Orphans”); in practice, he’s a running joke about poor people and a strangely callous sense of humanity for someone supposedly teaching lessons to everyone who has forgotten the spirit of the holiday.
Add on top of this a particularly gross Irene story, where her mental instability is played as both a joke and a point of conflict; from her cat-filled house to the voodoo doll she holds during football games, everything about Irene feels a bit too much – to the point it becomes believable that she might’ve brought a gun to Thanksgiving dinner to kill Pete. It’s a bad look for all characters involved; it’s where Chet’s “dinner and a show” approach to messing with everyone becomes nihilistic in a way it’s tough for the episode to recover from, and also displays how far Two Guys and a Girl will giddily go to show how “unstable” Irene is. It’s an entire third of the episode that is rendered unfunny by its delivery – and at times, even feels cruel in how it treats the latest outsider to find their way into the (former) Beacon Street Pizza gang.
At least “Talking Turkey” still manages to keep its humorous elements in place; Johnny and Sharon’s conflict remains mostly toothless, a farce that resolves in Sharon and Johnny agreeing to do something for a friend; and it rightly leaves Berg looking like a bit of a dick, as he chews mashed potatoes and decompresses from the unfolding events of the holiday evening. Even a funny episode is only as good as its stories, though – and ultimately, “Talking Turkey” boils down to “homeless guy convinces men their women are crazy”, which is a rather ineffective way to access some of the deeper, overarching stories Two Guys and a Girl is feigning towards. It’s why Ashley’s emotional declaration at the end, where she confronts Berg and tells him that she loved him and he really hurt her, feels like a weird, sudden shift back into the show’s expected reality – it’s an undeniably honest moment, but one that falls apart with all the farce and misdirection and nonsense catalyzing it.
On humor alone, “Talking Turkey” is an improvement over the show’s first Thanksgiving foray – though only a slight one. And it would, unfortunately, be the show’s last attempt at the fall holiday episode, with season four’s many running plot lines and inconsistent airing schedule moving it away from any traditional non-Halloween holiday. Given that its two undeniably similar attempts to capture that manic Thanksgiving energy didn’t work, perhaps that was for the best.
Other thoughts/observations:
- “No wonder I had a dream Cal Ripken Jr. was cupping my tenders.”
- Irene: “My outfit reflects the emptiness of my soul.”
- Johnny and Ashley take the chicken-turkey out of the oven multiple times during the episode. Let the damn thing cook, people!
- Berg, reflecting on Ashley’s (fake) pregnancy scare: “I don’t know if I’m ready to be a father; I barely even cut my own steak.”
- Ahh, I wish apartments in Boston were $700/month when I was their age!
- Up next: Pete’s grandfather returns in “Liver and Learn”.