Pop Girlie
Season 2
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
2 stars
**
Samir dreads telling his girlfriend, Carly, that her sudden pursuit of a career as a K-pop artist is doomed.
Photo: FX
Sometimes I look at the notes I take after an episode of TV, especially a lightweight sitcom like this one, and I’m not sure what to write about. I could list the top-five moments that made me laugh, sure, but that’s not enough. I firmly believe sitcoms like this one deserve to be recapped and reviewed in full. Plot-driven or prestige-y seriocomedies aren’t the only ones that deserve coverage.
But sometimes you get a sitcom episode that’s just … fine. It makes you laugh a few times, but very little about it lingers or feels substantial. That’s “Pop Girlie” for me.
Let’s see if we can figure out why. The episode starts promisingly enough with a funny premise: Anton’s throwaway adages are causing people to make drastic, impulsive decisions with their lives. Merely speaking a phrase like “Raw is the new cooked” is enough to convince a diner chef to experiment with sushi. Saying “A bare thigh is a wasted opportunity” to a waitress results in a giant infected tattoo. And, most relevant to the episode, claiming “a dentist is just a singer who hasn’t grabbed a microphone” leads Samir’s girlfriend to abandon her dentistry plans and pursue a career as a K-pop artist while in the middle of applying to residencies.
Random, but sure. We haven’t seen a ton of Carly yet this season, and it’s good to give her a spotlight, though she sounds almost unbelievably delusional with this new dream. It’s also good to give Samir a meaty story. He has spent all season bragging about what a natural and caring boyfriend he is, but now he’s being confronted with a much harder challenge: being honest. I understand his impulse to support his girlfriend’s dreams no matter what, but come on, how do you take a single called “Hiccups (Body Go Crazy)” seriously?
It’s a perfect song in how amusingly terrible it is, from the lyrics themselves to the dubstep-influenced sound. But it’s pretty easy to suss out the basic beats of the story from there. Carly keeps taking her new passion further, apparently spending all her tuition money on shooting a music video and renting a venue for a live performance plus merch and catering. Through it all, Samir knows it’s his responsibility to tell her the truth, but he just can’t, no matter how many times his friends remind him it needs to come from him. But then … eventually, I guess it does click, with Anton’s help, because Samir offers Carly an out while backstage and she takes it. Issa also plays a big role in saving the day, stalling for time with a performance of “I Dreamed a Dream,” which she’s been waiting to give since taking vocal lessons.
A lot of this stuff is funny, but it also doesn’t ever really go anywhere unexpected or hint at some deeper truth. Once again, things just sort of end with the credits rolling at the 20-minute mark before we get any closure on the event or Carly’s now-depleted savings, outside a basic one-sentence “I was just stressed and worried about my life being ordinary” explanation to justify her outlandish behavior. There’s room to go deeper there without sacrificing comedy, even in a show like this! And Samir’s journey in the episode remains fairly static throughout with no new twists or texture to his “I need to tell my girlfriend the truth, but I can’t bear it” dilemma.
The same goes for Anton’s side of things. Yes, it’s funny to watch him realize how much of a destructive effect he has had by unintentionally steering so many acquaintances in the wrong direction. There’s also a sweet moment when Paul Baker reassures Anton that people just care what he thinks, a generous and accurate reframing of Anton’s toxic influence. But it feels like a scene or conversation is missing near the conclusion of the episode, when Anton apparently redeems himself by offering Samir advice (and then stalling onstage). The idea here is that Samir wants to know what Anton really thinks, a parallel to Paul Baker’s earlier comment, but we don’t see what Anton tells him. When we see Samir next, he’s ready to tell Carly the truth, so it seems Anton just reiterated the same advice everyone has already been sharing about honesty.
In a typical episode of Adults, I tend to prefer the main story over a B- or C-plot because it usually feels a tad more thoughtful and fully fleshed out. But I think I prefer the wacky subplot in this episode over the Carly story, partly because Paul Baker makes for a fun straight man to play off Billie’s deranged career thirstiness. She’s still looking desperately for a job, which is the other ongoing narrative of season two, second only to the Issa–Paul Baker–Anton love triangle. And Paul Baker is the natural character to help her in this situation since he has so many jobs himself.
The specifics of Billie’s obliviousness and overcompensation really make this one, such as her deeply unwise ways of “spicing up” some networking chat and her bad habit of sleeping with men she’s supposed to be connecting with professionally. As always, she’s in denial about her irresponsibility, bragging about juggling her career and her sex life as if she’s Samantha Jones. Her ultimate fumble is glue-company CEO Scott Ritger, whom she brings to Carly’s show with the assumption that they’ll sleep together. She goes off on Scott when she hears him on the phone with his wife — but this time, of course, the CEO doesn’t actually want sex from her. He believed Carly when she described the show as a networking event. He even correctly interpreted her tongue-out emojis as self-deprecating, not sexual. Now she doesn’t get to have sex with him or get a job from him, the original thing she ostensibly wanted.
So another pathetic ending for poor Billie, who’s just trying to make some money and figure out her life — and have a lot of sex while doing it. What’s so wrong with that? The most solid and relatable running joke in “Pop Girlie” comes from Billie’s amenability to a wide range of career paths. “I could want to work in medical sales,” she remarks early on. “I could want to work in glue,” she says after meeting Scott. “I could want to be a locksmith,” she adds near the end with Paul Baker joining in. It’s a funny encapsulation of the type of mental gymnastics we perform when we don’t know where our lives and careers will take us next. Almost every crazy storyline on Adults has that kernel of emotional truth — which makes it just a tad disappointing when the show doesn’t take full advantage of its potential.
• “Did you hear that song? It sounds like a Stroke wrote it.”
• Carly’s 96-year-old grandfather came here from the Philippines for her performance, and it will not be the last thing he ever experiences, thankfully.
• I should mention that Rachel Marsh kills it throughout this episode and makes her character funnier than she may be on the page.
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