DWT TV Watch: Don't tell anyone, but suddenly this season The New Adventures of Old Christine got actually good

Among the odd folk in the life of Old Christine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), her partner -- and now wife -- Barb (Wanda Sykes) seems near-normal.

by Ken

We still have to talk about last week's Boston Legal's two-hour series finale (really just a pair of hourlong episodes). I thought did the show credit. Creator David E. Kelley, far from going out quietly, playing it safe, took big chances, and I thought made them work.

But before we get to that, I wanted to talk a little about The New Adventures of Old Christine, in case you might actually want to take a look at tonight's episode (CBS, 8pm ET/PT), which is the conclusion of a two-parter begun last week. Now if you happen to have watched an episode or two (or three or six) from the show's first three seasons (two of which were only partial seasons), you may wonder why on earth I would even suggest that you do such an insane thing as watch again.

I know, I know. I've spent a lot of time over these three-plus seasons, partial and whole, wondering why I was continuing to watch. Somehow I just couldn't help it. All I could think of was that it was like watching the proverbial train wreck, and being unable to look away. It's hard to think of a show, or for that matter any sort of gathering of human beings, where I've seen so unbearably ill at ease in their own skins. It didn't matter whether it was the characters or the actors, because it added up to the same thing.

You can identify with certain aspects of many of the characters' reality, and certainly you can feel sorry for them. But it would be awfully hard to really idenitfy with them, or even really like them. (I do note, though, that this seems to be increasingly common in the modern-day entertainment world. Perhaps those younger audiences being targeted are more receptive to casts of an noying and/or obnoxious people?)

In case you don't know, Old Christine centers around, well, Old Christine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), so-called because her ex-husband Richard (Clark Gregg) has a hot young blonde girlfriend who's also named Christine, and thus New Christine. Christine and Richard have an adorable but otherwise alarmingly ordinary son, Ritchie (Trevor Gagnon), and Christine also has a live-in younger brother, the lost-puppyish Matthew (Hamish Linklater), and a best friend, Barb (Wanda Sykes), who's more recently divorced than her and now also her partner in the women's gym she owns. Oh yes, Christine and Barb are now married, but that's just so Barb can stay in the country.

There are also two snootily superior moms from the fancy school where Ritchie falls at decidedly the lower end of the social spectrum. They live to torture Christine. We should probably also include as a regular, even though she was never seen until the recent Thanksgiving episode, Christine and Matthew's mythically monstrous mother. As often happens in real life when we meet purportedly monstrous mothers, theirs seemed fairly normal, except for her refusal to acknowledge the increasingly obvious fact that their father was missing. (They made the natural assumption, that Mom had killed Dad.)

In the earlier seasons the plots, such as they were, tended to consist of endless repetitions of a few notes: Christine's social maladroitness and general smug laziness about meeting life's challegnes (as illustrated by predictably disastrous interactions with men she dates), the dismalness of her life compared with the idyll that Richard appears to be living with the quite sweet New Christine, Matthew's general cluelessness. Especially given the level of self-absorption exhibited by nearly all the other characters, the tart-tongued Barb is about as close as we get to "normal" in this bunch. It wasn't that it was unbelievable, mind you. It was all too creepily believeable. But who would want to spent even half an hour a week in these people's company?

I don't know, maybe there was something there all along, and it only just clicked. But somehow it seems to me that the characters have sprouted just enough dimension to make their struggles against life in general both watchable and funny. In particular, ex-husband Richard, who mostly seemed a giggling cipher, has grown on me; he now shows enough self-awareness to appreciate both the miracle and the traps of his impending marriage to New Christine. The writers have also allowed Matthew to move on with his life a bit.

And I thought last week's episode, the one that's being completed tonight, was quite terrific. Christine and Barb face an inspection of the gym by the ever-enthusiastic Bloom Gym franchise owner, Margaret (Megan Mullally), who is also set to authorize all new equipment for the gym when she finds out about the partners' marital status, which turns out to violate a clause in their contract, which it turns out Christine never troubled to read -- and she's darned peeved even to be asked if she did. We're not talking about fine print here. She apparently didn't give any thought to the idea of reading the contract. Margaret informs them that as a result they're going to have their franchise pulled.

The ladies think they're saved, however, when Matthew reads the contract and realize that what it forbids isn't them being married, it's them being gay. Christine and Barb are delighted to realize that since, of course, they're not gay, everything should be okay! (Make what you will of Wanda Sykes's recent coming out.) Christine, leaving Matthew appalled at her gleeful embrace of the company's homophobia, dashes off to Margaret's hotel room to break the news that she and Barb aren't gay.

And sure enough, everything is okay now! Unless you count Margaret's relentless hitting on Christine, which Margaret insists is just friendliness -- of the sort that apparently all the women in the company engage in. Eventually Christine's conscience acted up -- who knew she even had a conscience? -- and she had second thoughts about the whole business. And it only seems to prove that she's right to so rarely have first thoughts, let alone second ones.

I gather that the whole business is a gimmick to get them out of the gym business and into spa ownership, which is what's going to happen. But I've found it all utterly disarming, and a hilarious spotlight on unreflecting sexual bigotry. Suddenly this season the show has become not just quirky but weirdly delightful. I can hardly wait for tonight's episode!

Christine got a shock when she visited Margaret (Megan Mullally), the anti-gay babe-chasing owner of her gym franchise, in her hotel room.

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