TV Reviews for Regular People: The Unicorn
Walton Goggins in The Unicorn, CBS Television
A few years ago, our church choir director lost his wife. All the single church ladies circled around him like sharks targeting a wounded seal.
I kept thinking about this while watching the new CBS comedy “The Unicorn.” The show follows the adventures of widower Walton Goggins as he jumps back into the dating scene a year after his wife’s death. He’s been so overwhelmed with his grief, that his house has gone to pot (dogs are lounging on the kitchen counter) and he and his daughters are still living off all the casseroles their friends brought over after the funeral. It’s the end of the free meals that pushes Walt to a breaking point, and his friends use this as an opening to tell him it’s time to move on.
So, he finds a dating app, fills out a profile, and his phone immediately blows up. Because Walt is the proverbial “unicorn” of online dating: a genuinely nice guy who is a caring father, gainfully employed, not on probation, has no substance abuse problems, and has only had sex with one woman in the last 20 years. “You’re factory fresh,” one of his female friends explains. “Technically, he’s certified pre-owned” he husband quips. Hell, I’D date him and I know he’s just a fictional character!
Unlike a lot of the other new shows this season, this one doesn’t have a big name star. I had to search through IMDB just to figure out where I’d seen them before (Hello, “Hot Tub Time Machine” guy!) It also doesn’t have any wild plot that will be hard to maintain after the first few episodes. Just the daily life of the average guy trying to move on with his life after the death of his wife. You know why there are so many shows with dead moms? Because single dads are funny! Watch him learn how to do laundry! And cook! And tell his teenage daughter the facts of life! Sure, we’ve seen it before. Maybe we’ve even seen it done better. But this is a show for our current time, and judging from the first episode, it will be a fun journey to watch.
I give it three stars, and I’m keeping in the DVR.
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Well, I’m not a single father, but there are definitely more than one humorous moment where I talked about sex with my teenage daughter. So there’s that. But I am tired of jokes about learning to cook or do laundry. Geez, my father was a good cook, and a good seamstress, too. I think he taught me how to do ironing, in fact.
You see, he was once a sailor, and had to do all that stuff for himself. Also, being the youngest boy, he had to help his mom in the kitchen, which he enjoyed, in part because she was awesome and fun to be around.
So yeah, I am stupidly tired of “man learns to do laundry” jokes. But talking about sex with your teenage daughter is an evergreen source of humor.Report
” I had to search through IMDB just to figure out where I’d seen them before (Hello, “Hot Tub Time Machine” guy!)”
Among a certain set, Goggins is quite famous. He was the recuring bad guy/ex-wife dater in Justified, one of the key officers on The Shield and the co-star of a Tarrantino movie.Report
None of which I have ever watched!Report
Exactly… I watched the first episode and had two thoughts:
1. How can this possibly play out past a pilot without becoming the most inane sitcom ever.
2. You’re doing Walton Goggins wrong.
The only good Goggins is a morally ambiguous Goggins.Report
The show seems tailor designed to piss me off. It contains a lot of the dumb romantic fantasies popular among regular people like date worthy men being in short supply that don’t match up to reality, where a lot of people are romantically frustrated because they want to have their cake and eat it to.Report
When I was a kid, Gramma passed away and Grampa was dating Nana after about a year.
It was scandalous.
Sigh.
Anyway, I have been married for about 21 years (come the 26th!) and I am one of those guys who knows how to cook and do laundry. I hate to consider something like “getting back in the dating game” but all of the jokes that would surround someone like me starting to date again would… well, they’d mostly involve me not talking about stuff that I always used to be able to talk about, not doing stuff that I’d always been about to used to be able to do, and having to change for someone that isn’t the person that I married when I was in my 20’s.
Jokes about how the new woman is surprised that I know how to do laundry and cook, I suppose.Report
I’d be interested to see how men who fit this guy’s profile do with online dating IRL.Report
If they’re funny and good-looking, they do as well as they wish.
If they’re like the rest of us — sometimes but not always funny, and laboring with physical imperfections — dating again in middle age is a patience-draining, ego-bruising, time-consuming, and drearily-celibate experience.Report
As a single dad (by divorce, not death), I really bristle at all the, “Ain’t it so charming that they’re all still alive?!” motif. And further still that more often than not I just indulge that rather than push back.Report