Although
I’ve talked before about how Greg’s position in the show frequently made me
nervous as a Josh fan, I do like him as a character. The show takes him places
that aren’t always expected, and even if the “Greg 2.0” stuff in the last
season isn’t entirely successful for me, we’ll always have Paris/Original
Recipe Greg Serrano. (Some Greg-related spoilers.)
At very
first glimpse, Greg seems like the obvious “real” candidate for Rebecca’s
affections. It seems all but a foregone
conclusion that she’ll ultimately get a wakeup call about Josh, open her eyes,
and see the nice-guy bartender standing beside her. Fortunately, though, the show doesn’t keep
things that simple. While Josh’s persona
gets retooled quite a bit in the early episodes, Greg’s opens up to reveal much
more complexity than we find in the beginning.
What emerges is a sort-of friend/possible lover for Rebecca who is much
more aware of her issues than others, at least in part because he’s dealing
with a host of issues himself.
To be
sure, Greg is a bartender, though
he’d prefer not to be. He’d love to get
out of West Covina, go to business school, and “make something” of himself, but
he put his dreams on hold to take care of his sick dad. And in case that last point didn’t tip you
off, it’s also true that Greg’s a nice-guy type, but again, it’s not quite than
clear-cut. I wouldn’t go nearly as far
as to call him a Nice Guy, but Greg does have a tendency to rue his niceness a
bit. While he’s certainly not going to
leave his dad when he’s needed (even if his dad doesn’t particularly want to be the fall guy for Greg not following
his dreams,) he laments that he’s such a stand-up guy who can’t go after what
he wants, and with Rebecca, he convinces himself that the only way to win her
over is act like he doesn’t care
about her.
Right
around here is where we start to see Greg’s big bundle of insecurities. He takes it as gospel that Rebecca’s
disinterest in him is the surest proof that she’s his type, he looks down on
his work, he has a warped view of his difficult relationship with his mother,
and while he talks a big game about wanting to do something more with his life,
he keeps one foot out of the water instead of taking a wholehearted
plunge. He carries a lot of negativity
around with him – mostly concerning his views of himself, his bad breaks, and
the town he lives in – and his coping mechanism of choice, sarcasm, can be
sharper than his friends are prepared to deal with.
But just
like I love Rebecca for being such a beautiful mess, I really like Greg in all
of his flaws. His screw-ups feel true to
life and his self-sabotage can be painful.
Even as I sympathize with some of the more unfortunate hands he’s been
dealt, I totally get why his friends occasionally need a break from his moods,
but that’s okay. It all works for
me. For one, I’m way more about
characterization than character, and I’ll gladly take a messed-up guy who’s
more sensitive than he lets on and is good at pretending not to care about
things that matter to him over some bland guy-next-door with no discernible
wrinkles to his characterization. Simply
put, one feels real, and that’s what I look for in my fiction. But beyond that, another reason Greg’s issues
work for me is because he does have
plenty of good qualities to balance them out.
Despite the frequently-cartoonish tone, no one on this show is just one
thing, and that includes Greg. I love
the moments when he can let the aloof-sarcasm routine drop and be real with
someone about how he feels, for good or ill.
I love that he works on his problems, trying to recognize when he falls
into dynamics that he knows aren’t good for him and trying not to self-fulfill
his often-defeatist prophecies. But by the same token, I love that his progress
on that front isn’t a straight line.
Part of
the reason why I struggle with Greg 2.0 is that quite a few of those wrinkles
feel ironed out, and I’m not altogether sure how to take it. It’s true that
Greg disappears from the show for about two seasons, not returning until he
really has done serious work on
himself (including AA and actually going to business school.) As a character,
he’s changed a lot, and the show lampshades recasting the no-longer-available
Santino Fontana with Skylar Astin by Rebecca insisting that Greg has become “a
completely different person.”
I get
what the show is trying to do with it, and I am glad about Greg being in a healthier place. But my problem is
that I can’t tell whether or not that’s what a healthier Greg looks like.
Something feels off, and I don’t know if it’s because the writing isn’t
believably-Greg or because Astin doesn’t quite sell me on him being the same
character, albeit one who’s grown quite a bit since he was played by Fontana. A
wire got crossed somewhere, and it never fully comes together for me.
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