Long after the TV-watching world was ready to declare a moratorium on all jokes relating to social media and these kids and their Twitternets, The League of all shows somehow manages to pull it off. Surprisingly, it’s Taco who decides to fight back against the monolithic death-grip Mark Zuckerberg and his minions have over our lives, only because it seems out-of-character for Taco to care enough about anything to get annoyed by it.
That being said, irritated by the guys’ irritating Facebook habits (“Good pizza. Good friends. Good times,” posts Andre while everyone’s out to dinner, met with a series of eye rolls and disparaging remarks. We all have that friend.), Taco creates “MyFace,” an “offline social network,” or essentially the formalities of social media injected into IRL situations. He creates a “wall,” a bulletin board / collage / collection of Post-Its and unflattering photos akin to the ones girls make in high school (or the one on Andre’s vanity, probably the best moment of Andre setting himself up for brutal mockery this episode). The social network scenes are, for the most part, really, really funny: Taco breaks into Kevin and Jenny’s house to bring them a “message” inviting them to the service, but the highlight comes when he makes Jenny “recover her password,” going so far as to ask her really personal “security questions” (“What color panties are you wearing?”) and imitate the CAPTCHA art (“That’s just a spider with penises for legs.”). This could have easily been an irritating ploy, but because the show commits to it and is willing to go into the bizarre with it, it totally works.
Elsewhere in the league, Jenny can’t remember her and Kevin’s “Sex-iversary,” hardly new territory for TV comedy in dealing with marrieds. Although it’s still surprisingly somewhat refreshing now in the wake of all these abhorrent “What happened to manliness?!” trying-to-be-All In The Family-but-failing-to-touch-on-anything-culturally-relevant sitcoms out right now where men are at the mercy of their domineering wives who will give them a root canal with a rusty nail should they dare forget a birthday or anniversary or whatever to see the typical gender roles reversed, the subplot kind of lacks weight.
Ruxin is struggling with his lineup, falling behind to Jenny and the rest as his bench continues to outperform his starters. Andre takes him to yoga (the second time in a row one of the guys has accompanied Andre on one of his self-beautification activity days) and Ruxin, entranced by tramp stamp, reaches “Lineup Nirvana.” This works for a while, of course, until Ruxin and Andre abuse their power and get kicked out of the class, leading to a last-minute plot addition about Ruxin’s excessive use of sarcasm which didn’t quite get developed as much as it could have.
While they watch the game (and Ruxin’s new lineup suddenly returns his team to form), Pete is sending Kevin creepy texts and we learn about “Bobbum Man.” Apparently, the guys all created characters with the purpose of calling each other and creeping each other out—for example, Andre is a wildly over-exaggerated Cajun shellfish purveyor called the “Crawdad Man,” Ruxin is “Korean Dick Vitale” (just… no) and Kevin is “Mundane Ejaculation Man.” The most terrifying incarnation of these is Pete’s “Bobbum Man,” a psychopathic vagrant-drifter who seeks to terrorize Kevin’s “bobbum” with his “equipmunk.” It’s probably the best league in-joke we’ve been brought into since “Shiva Nagila” and one of the many gentle reminders this show has provided about how totally weird our friends can be sometimes.
Kevin’s suburban-dad-buffoon role is amplified by his legitimate fear of Bobbum Man, which consumes him to the point that he ruins his “Sex-iversary” by talking about “bobbums” and “equipmunk” while getting intimate with Jenny. Not helping is the fact that Taco, fiercely committed to the growth of his offline social network, has the genius idea to create an avatar of Bobbum Man with a “MyFace” profile to strike fear into Kevin’s poor heart, and even better, his casting choice is Rafi, brilliant as ever. The episode ends with poor Andre trying to get in on the joke as always, enacting his revenge on the gang as Bobbum Man and getting beaten into Lineup Nirvana. We’ll give this one a like, and maybe a +1 for effective use of Rafi.
Miscellaneous extra goodness:
It’s in the episode trailer, but it’s still Rafi at his best: “I’m gonna poke you.” “I’m gonna stab you. Offline. With a real knife.”
“What’s a crawdad?” “Like, evil shrimp.”
Kevin’s “Profile Pic” face, which is the face most people make when reading the vast majority of the inane dreck people post on Facebook.
Rafi’s apartment: “What is that?” “That’s his toilet/kitchen.” “Both?”
Every time anyone said “equipmunk.” The amazing thing was how deadpan it was, how it just became part of the characters’ lexicon.