Happy Endings

Happy Endings

Happy Endings, on the very surface, could to any passing viewer simply look like another Friends clone. A group of three guys and three girls, all in their prime and living it up in a busy city, a controlling matriarch, a ditzy blonde and a lazy guy with a love of Italian fast food? All sound pretty familiar to fans of Friends.

Give it a second look though, and Happy Endings is something else completely. There’s no womanising cad (all the show’s fellows are pretty terrible at wooing) and the show has an openly gay main character.

Happy Endings has also grown stronger and stronger with time. The longer the show goes on, the more the characters have had time to bed in and become truly likeable, with a slow burn appeal that will only help the show in the long run.

Happy Endings might also try harder than any other show to get an indecent amount of laughs out of you in 22 minutes, with the dialogue and banter being that fast that the show’s scripts must be twice as long as the nearest competitor. The magical thing is that it never comes across as desperate, thanks to the fantastic cast and the extremely high hit rate of the rapid fire jokes.

That the cast’s full of comedians helps terribly too, with Casey Wilson and Adam Pally and Eliza Coupe especially excelling as the eternally optimistic and useless Penny, the lazy Max and the highly strung Jane respectively. Their natural comedic ability stands out a country mile, with the show never feeling like actors mugging for the camera or overplaying a situation like some sitcoms end up doing.

Happy Endings never sits still, either on a joke or an emotional issue, making the show constantly moving at a pace that not even the most attention deficit of audiences could get bored.

The show’s not afraid of breaking down the 4th wall either, with the show even going so far as to have a character make a joke that each of them is a character on Friends and mocking Elisha Cuthbert’s run in with a mountain lion from her time on drama 24.

With time, the show’s been able to find its own tempo, its own humour and its own voice. Both critics and audiences have reacted in the same way, with many critics that wrote the show off to start with now completely on board with the show and praising it as one of the best comedies on US TV. Viewer ratings have also grown, with the second season consistently raking in over a million more viewers than its debut year.

With Happy Endings back for a third season in the States, we can just hope that the show continues this upwards trend (both in terms of viewers and comedy value) because if so, the sky’s the limit for Happy Endings.

FemaleFirst Cameron Smith

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