Take Three: Breeders

Breeders: Season 1, Episode 3 “No Accident” (B+)

This show deals with the struggles of parenting and how things sometimes get out of control, but it’s not one that’s about to have its central characters sent to prison or seeing their children taken away from them by protective services. That doesn’t mean there’s not an opportunity for fun in the form of the hospital administrator letting Paul know that she absolutely remembers him from the many visits he and Ally had with their son after a number of accidents. The series of unfortunate events didn’t recommend Paul and Ally as terribly cautious or protective parents, and luckily their good nature came through during the social worker visit even if Paul couldn’t make a gracious exit that showed he knew how to operate a childproofed apparatus. Opening the episode with Paul struggling to keep his parents from getting themselves into more trouble with Ally had to distract her son while her daughter was shouting about needing to poop set the tone for an entertaining half-hour. Michael wanting to stay for longer because his unemployment benefits weren’t coming through and he wasn’t having any luck finding something else was predictable, and while Ally wasn’t able to do much to prevent it from happening, her mother wasn’t about to even enter a home she knew he had visited, presenting a more irritating and likely repetitive problem. Michael doesn’t seem like a bad person, just someone whose behavior isn’t ever likely to change and who manages to always charm his way back into the same situations over and over again.