After watching roughly four hours of The Crazy Ones, I still can’t say I have a handle on what the show is striving for. Is it an attempt at telling a story of a successful copywriter dealing with his best days possibly being behind him? Or is it about said copywriter earning the trust of his daughter that he often abandoned in her childhood? Or is The Crazy Ones just trying to be a comedic version of Mad Men? After “The Stan Wood Account,” I have a new theory: it’s a last resort for television legends to remind the public that they still exist, however without any of the qualities that made their original shows great.
The show already has David E. Kelley, creator of Ally McBeal, along with both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mork from Ork starring. Not content with letting these greats take a nosedive, “The Stan Wood Account” takes on two other TV legends. First is Ed Asner. Poor, poor Eddie. Asner plays Glenn Hastings, who played Mr. Finger in a string of successful ads back in the ‘80s for a cleaning product. I had high hopes for Asner’s appearance—I mean, he was Lou Grant!—but The Crazy Ones turns him into a lecherous old man and an opportunity to make plenty of fingering jokes.
After Sydney does some mild old-man flirting, Glenn begins to think that the two of them are dating and French kisses her after a dinner meeting. Turns out this is his way of getting younger ladies, playing the old man card to gain sympathy. Now I don’t have a problem with Asner playing a creep, but his character hardly is anything but an excuse for a joke that Sarah Michelle Gellar had an old man’s tongue down her throat and other immature and lame lines.
The other more promising character introduced is Gordon, played by Brad Garrett, who is apparently Simon’s partner at the business. Why his name isn’t represented in the business name and why we haven’t met him yet is beyond me. There are only three things that we seemingly need to know about Gordon: he’s an accountant, he’s tall and he’s gay. So yes, now Simon actually has a gay person to make all of his unnecessary gay jokes at!
But Gordon is now appearing for the first time because he is questioning an account known as The Stan Wood Account. He’s never heard of a Stan Wood or the wallpaper account that they have, which is probably because it’s all a cover for a used car dealership that they work with. The team can’t have two different dealerships because it’d be a conflict of interest, but since they were their first client, Simon has kept them on.
Gordon tells Simon that they must get rid of the account, so to make it up to the dealership, Simon and his team of workers (except for Sydney, who’s too busy making out with Lou Grant) decide to help the dealership sell all of its cars. Because they don’t have anything more important to do.
It’s nice and all that they want to keep their first account, but it also doesn’t make much sense. I mean, if the account has been with them since the beginning, how is Gordon just now discovering this discrepancy? Also, for a company that literally represents an entire continent and some of the biggest corporations in the world, wouldn’t a rinky-dink used car dealership stand out? I hardly doubt they’re paying close to as much as Australia is for advertisements.
The Crazy Ones has always disappointed me with the way it squanders the talent behind it with such dumb jokes, but now the show is expanding into even more TV greats and making it all the more disheartening. What’s worse is that The Crazy Ones is just so bland, it could quite possibly be one of the most boring shows on network television. It’s not great, it’s not bad, it’s just…blah—and that’s a horrible place for a show to be.