What I’m Watching: How To Be a Gentleman

How To Be a Gentleman: Season 1, Episode 7 “How to Get Along with Your Boss’ New Girlfriend” (B+)

This episode perfectly exemplifies the nature of traditional laugh-track sitcoms, to present a rather straightforward and expected situation and milk the comedy out of them. Bert’s efforts to help turn Jerry’s life around were clearly going to fail, and setting him up with Andrew’s mom was definitely not a productive idea. It was entertaining to watch Bert try to coach a blouse-wearing Jerry on how to pick up women in a bar, first sending in a clown in the form of an overzealous Mike and then continuing the parade of idiots with a clueless Andrew. Ultimately, Jerry’s relationship with Diane proved inconsequential since the guy with the ponytail who so intrigued Bert ended up getting the back page anyway. Diane saying that she didn’t want gifts for her birthday while not so secretly hoping for the opposite resulted in an amusing display of Andrew’s irksome positive qualities, which in this case would be his need to one-up everyone else, which he managed to do and then some with his hand-made pixilated super picture, compared with four ten-dollar gift cards from Janet. Swapping gifts wasn’t going to fool her, and Andrew’s delight at being complimented was hardly subtle. I’m so pleased to have this show as a nice weekend summer treat, since I thought that it was coming back for just an episode or two back in May, whereas, by the end of its run in a couple of weeks, it’s actually going to end up airing at least double the number of new episodes originally shown back in September.