NBC’s Thursday Comedy Recap

Since 30 Rock doesn’t start until October 4^th, the Saturday Night Live primetime election special was on tonight. It was mostly staged as a Weekend Update and featured a whole lot of jokes about the presidential candidates. In case you didn’t guess it, there were a whole lot of jokes about Mitt Romney being out of touch. Like a regular episode of Saturday Night Live, it was a little lacking.

Some big changes happened on Up All Night. The Ava Show gets cancelled, leaving Reagan and Ava to reevaluate their career plans. Chris tries to go back to his old job as a lawyer but realizes that he will be stuck working on exactly the same case he was on two years earlier (the goal was to draw the case out for as long as possible for more billable hours). Instead of working at the old law firm, Chris talks Reagan’s brother Scott, a contractor working for his verbally abusive ex-father-in-law, to quit his job so that they can go into business together. Guess he’s another kooky regular who will be in the Brinkleys’ daily life now.

With Chris working, Reagan takes on the role of stay-at-home mother. This should be interesting to watch given her ultra-competitive nature. Ava is convinced that Reagan is trying to sabotage her post-Ava Show life, and they get into a huge fight that involves Ava kissing every baby on the playground (only Maya Rudolph could pull that off) and ends with the two eating leftover Greek yogurt while cleaning out their Ava Show offices so that the new tenants won’t get to eat it. In the end, Chris is working on the contracting business with Scott, Reagan is home with Amy, and Ava is working on the job search while drinking wine at the Brinkley house.

Over on The Office, we finally find out something about the documentary filmmakers! They’ve been filming to see what happens to the employees over time. OK, it’s not a huge clue, but it’s something. Over the summer, Kelly moved to Ohio with her fiancé (Mindy Kaling actually got her own show on Fox, The Mindy Project). Ryan also moved to Ohio, but claims it’s because it will be the next Silicone Valley. Riiight. Everything is the same with the Halperts and it is obvious that Jim is craving change. By the end of the episode, Jim decides to join his friend’s startup in Philadelphia.

We also learn that Oscar has been secretly dating Angela’s closeted husband. When Angela needs to find a new home for her most allergenic pants-wearing cat because her baby is allergic, Oscar agrees to take it to make his lover happy. There are two new employees, Clark and Pete, who look strangely like Dwight and Jim. Dwight decides that Clark is after his job so he feels the need to out-do him. Andy, having returned from an Outward Bound summer trip, is surprised to see that Nellie still works there and tried various schemes to get her to quit. She’s still there.

Parks and Recreation follows Leslie and Andy on a trip to Washington, D.C., to see their respective significant others, Ben and April. Once she sees Ben’s important position and finds that she can’t get face time with a bureaucrat, Leslie gets quite upset and blows off Olympia Snow, Barbara Boxer, and John McCain. It inspires her to take a more active approach in Pawnee. While Leslie is gone, Ron Swanson takes over the employee barbeque. He bans vegetables of any kind as well as all of the traditional activities, then insists on killing a pig named Tom (not the character Tom) but a park ranger tells him that he can’t, so he buys meat and cooks it very slowly. The employees are unhappy with length of time it takes to get food, so Ron storms off, dragging the barbeque behind his car.

Later, he tells the team how much he appreciate them by barbequing Tom the pig and serving him. Anne and Tom keep up the charade that they’ve been living together in order to prove everyone else who believed they couldn’t do it wrong, and to win a bet for Tom. They constantly put glitter in household products and end up cracking. Once the secret is out, they are free to back to living normally.

All in all, this wasn’t a bad batch of season premieres. They each had a lot of big changes to include, but handled it all with humor. Full disclosure: I skipped watching each of these programs regularly last season (all but 30 Rock), but these season premieres were easy to catch up with and blended the humor in well. Not bad for the first week!