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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: May 25, 2011
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Happy Endings, “The Shershow Redemption” (Season 1, Episode 12) [Stream on Hulu]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Ending a season of a sitcom with a wedding happens often enough that it’s pretty much a trope. Most often, one of the main characters is walking down the aisle, but the third-party wedding is also pretty tried and true. For a sitcom about (mostly) single twentysomethings like Happy Endings, having the whole gang convene at an old college friend’s wedding was pretty perfect. Even more perfect considering that the series began with an aborted wedding (Dave and Alex’s, specifically).
“The Shershow Redemption” is one of the best Happy Endings episodes, and it came at a time when viewers had just begun to come around on the show after its slow start. An episode that spreads the comedic wealth pretty easily, the episode still belonged to Penny (Casey Wilson), who begins to unspool when the gang finds out that their old pal Shershow (a very funny TJ Miller) is getting married. Like a good sitcom episode, it takes a kernel of something real and relatable (that thing where your old friends star pairing off and getting married and you feel like you’re going to be the only single one remaining) and then spins out the comedy from there. In this case, Penny shows up to the wedding, sees how happy and stable Shershow and his fiancée (June Diane Raphael) are, and immediately makes up a fake fiancé so she’ll seem less pathetic. Later, when the only guy she can get to pass off as this apocryphal fiancé is delightfully loud and gay Derrick.
Casey Wilson gives the kind of performance that, honestly, should have earned her an Emmy nomination. She’s that good. Penny could have been such an irredeemably broad caricature of a single woman, but Wilson managed to keep her lunacy grounded and relatable. Her rehearsal-dinner speech is some of the finest, funniest drunk-acting you’ll see.
It’s just an incredibly funny season finale, and it’s no surprise that the show came back in season 2 with a pocket of fans ready to make this one a cult favorite. We’re still waiting for that revival!
