Oh man, hilarious episode! While the plot movement on both storylines is fairly minimal, the show makes up for it with jokes, sight gags, and impeccable deliveries for days. Andrew Rannells is delightfully ridiculous, and Don Cheadle, Regina Hall, and Paul Scheer all bring it pretty hard too.
Dawn and Mo (plus Yassir) are going to the Grammys with Nomi, where a number of long-stewing professional/personal relationship issues between Mo, Dawn, and Nomi come to a head. Blair offers to help Tiff bribe a hard-partying NASDAQ guy to sign off on Pfaff Fashions’ IPO, but their plans for a hedonistic night of debauchery are thrown out of whack when the guy’s eagle-eyed wife comes along to mind his behavior. Keith tries to reconnect with Mike, but the siren call of wild work situations keeps pulling him away.
The Mo/Dawn/Nomi stuff is all great. Recent changes at the record label have given Dawn and Nomi more clout than Mo, despite the fact that it’s his company, and Mo is obviously incredibly-poorly-equipped to deal with that. It all comes to a head at the Grammys, where he spirals out over another music producer’s professional interest in Dawn and Nomi. I laughed so hard at the delivery of, “Motherfucker, I will climb up the front of your tall ass and beat you down!”, and Dawn has such a spectacular, rambling, logically-inconsistent but wholly-accurate summation of her complicated relationship with Mo.
The Keith subplot, which is more of a rider attached to Blair’s storyline, is very sitcom-tropey, but it’s still amusing. This is a classic “two dates at the same time” scenario, even though one of the “dates” is actually a work crisis (and for me, that caveat is probably what helps to make it as funny as it is.) Still, it gives us ridiculously-transparent lies, Keith rushing back and forth between locales, and completely-different outfits for each setting, all of which he then has to keep track of.
And then there’s Blair. I tell you, in this storyline, the ante just keeps getting upped. It’s blatantly farcical but just done so well, and Rannells and Scheer play wonderfully off of each other. I’ve commented before about Rannells’s talent for playing the most patently-absurd material with utter sincerity, and that’s 100% true here. Blair’s reactions throughout are *chef’s kiss* - whether he’s falling apart in front of you or I-just-can’t-with-this-anymore blasé, he’s constantly hilarious. As a bonus, we also get Blair doing a bit of ludicrous straight drag. Which is interesting, since, as a GOP politician, Blair is professionally closeted, and I noted last season how much more he seemed to be consciously aiming for straight-presenting after he realized he was gay. As such, his bro-y act here is really put-on compared to his usual congressman act, and it’s fun to get this insight into his overboard impression of what a straight guy is.
Rannells, from start to finish, for the effing win. I love everything about his acting in this episode. Just to pick out a few gems, mostly devoid of context, I want to single out 1) his whining delivery of “drug-deal fuck-fest!”, 2) his frantic demand, “And bring food because all we have to eat are drugs!”, and 3) his quiet observation, “You’re doing coke off a cough syrup bottle. Like putting a hat on a hat.”
Honestly, he’s just a treasure. Rannells’s TV career can be a double-edged sword for me, because series-regular commitments are likely what keeps him from doing more Broadway, but at the same time, I’m so happy that we get entire series’ worth of his acting that I can revisit whenever I want.
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