This week, The League dropped back-to-back episodes as the season inches closer towards the Super Bowl and the finale, and all the usual lineup mainstays were there: Kevin reaching new levels of hapless buffoon (“Your aimlessness fascinates me,” Taco tells him), Taco engrossed in some absolutely incredible scheme and Andre being Andre. Much of it works, some of it falls to weirdness and overkill and occasionally, The League fails to take its own advice: “When a play works, you keep it running until it’s stopped.” At times, they needed to pull back the ridiculousness.
“Yobogoya” starts with Taco and Kevin having a “brother lunch” in Daley Plaza, with Taco attacking a beef bowl from the titular nondescript fast-food-pan-Asian restaurant. Taco calls it “research” to win free beef bowls for life / a slowly disintegrating digestive tract in the Yobogoya jingle contest. Kevin tries to convince Taco that he needs to start updating the lineup of his fantasy team—team name: ‘Password is TACO’—before Andre interrupts to inform the gentleman he’s become an urban forager. He exits to go look for greens in a patch outside an office building—only to discover the mushroom caps he thinks he sees are in fact used condoms. It all goes downhill from there, and it’s among the more outrageous of Andre’s yuppie habits that have been on display, but it’s in character and Paul Scheer, per usual, does a good job playing it up. Towards the end of the episode, Andre invites everyone for a foraged dinner, but they are saved by Taco and his winning jingle—”Yobogoya, the taste will destroy ya! The cheapest bucket of beef in Illinois-ya!”—and tons of free Yobogoya.
The other plots—Kevin not washing his hands, Taco’s lineup, Ruxin’s avoiding illness to impress his super-intense case partner, Mr. Hudabega, played explosively and quite well by Mr. Ray Liotta—aren’t particularly memorable, but Pete finally gets a subplot that doesn’t involve him sleeping with anyone, and it ends up being one of the best bits of the episode. Pete engages in a standoff with an obnoxious traffic cop known as ‘Glovesy’ (for the white traffic gloves he wears)—it’s a lot of physical comedy, and it inevitably ends in a fender-bender, and it works.
Ray Liotta’s cameo could have been shaved down a bit, and Kevin was especially irritating in his haplessness—he has to get out of the car in Glovesy-spurred traffic because the Yobogoya beef bucket is making a dramatic exit, as it were—this direction his character has gone into has gotten a bit out of hand. But the colorful, J-Pop-influenced, sensory-overload Yobogoya! ad at the end though, where Taco is dressed like a Japanese cartoon character-meets-lost member of Good Charlotte, is worth the episode-long wait. The beef-eating cartoon Abraham Lincoln. Oh man.
“Carmenjello” was decidedly the lesser of the two: neither major plot really finds the right balance between being unmemorable and just being completely insane. Ruxin and Sofia’s relationship—now strained because she accuses him of favoring one breast over the other, prompting Ruxin to want to have a naked statue built of her to prove he loves her body. The only standout bit of this is probably Ruxin using a breast implant as a stress ball.
Meanwhile, while visiting his old high school, Andre gets into an altercation with “Carmenjello” (pronounced like “Carmangelo”), the custodian. He gets accused of racism for assuming “Carmenjello” is his name (“I just thought your mom liked opera and desserts!”) and invites Carmenjello/Steve for a spa day to bury the hatchet. The line about the “beer summit” merited a chuckle, as was Andre’s “separate but equal road” slip-up, but the rest of this plot-line seemed like it was just going for the cringe-laugh double without much regard to character or plot development. And when Kevin enters to take a picture of Carmenjello to figure out the swatch to paint Ellie’s room, it’s a move that seems even beyond poor, misguided Kevin, although his explanation—”It’s nothing to do with racism! It’s the color of your skin!”—got a laugh.
Kevin is not only his usual buffoon self, but this time he brings Jenny down to his level. When Ellie walks in on them about to get intimate while trying to find a color to paint her room, she makes some ridiculous excuse about “zipper fairies” and refers to the sanitary napkins Ellie finds as “underwear stickers” (both references come back to haunt them later in the episode). Although the scene does a good job capturing the awkwardness of trying to sidestep the “birds and the bees” conversation, this is pretty well-worn TV comedy territory and is a little bit painful.
As with “Yobogoya,” Taco steals the show, this time with a harebrained scheme to invest in “forever stamps.” Honestly, the fact that the writers of The League have consistently come up with enjoyable schemes for Taco is probably one of the series’ strong points overall. Anyway.
The most redemptive moment of “Carmenjello” came at the end, when the beneficiary of Andre’s donation is revealed: the school’s abstinence club and resource center. Andre, clearly mortified, of course delivers a cringe-worthy speech talking about how much action he got in high school (the line about “garbage time” was amazing), complete with one adorably overzealous high school virgin who sounds and looks like a Book of Mormon cast member. Had the whole episode been that funny, it would have been among the season’s best.
Anyway, both episodes have their moments, but if you’re going to watch just one, make it “Yobogoya.” One word of advice though: do not, under any circumstances, accidentally misspell “Yobogoya” and type “Yobagoya” into Google Image Search. You’re not going to like what you see.
Miscellaneous goodness:
Andre saying “wellies”
Ruxin on Ellie: “She’s like a petri dish with pigtails.”
Taco’s first attempt at a Yobogoya jingle: “Yobagoya, our safety record is spotless / serving undiseased meat from a diseased carcass”
Taco pronouncing “Cam Newton” as “Came Newtown”
“If you can’t afford a Porterhouse, you deserve to get hepatitis!”
Ruxin to the high school students in “Carmenjello”: “All your teachers smoke pot!”
Rating: “Yobogoya!” 7.8 / “Carmenjello”: 6.8