The Book of Rannells: The New Normal: Season 1, Episode 13 – “Stay-at-Home Dad” (2013)

This is a cute episode.  It can be a little on-the-nose at times and maybe a bit too dedicated to its mission of showing what terrors 10-year-old girls can be, but it’s fun and funny, with some delightful jokes.

Burnt out on trying to find prospective nannies, Bryan and David contemplate the possibility of one of them staying home after the baby comes, with both of them wanting the job.  To test their respective mettles as stay-at-home dads, they volunteer to watch Shania while they send Goldie to a spa getaway, where each in turn learns just how much harder parenting is than they expect.

If I have a complaint, it’s that, although both the guys get a(n entertaining) rude awakening on the difficulties of parenting, David at least starts out on a pretty solid run before running into problems, whereas Bryan does a fairly bad job even before he starts to get overwhelmed.  The moral of the episode is that the two have different strengths as fathers and need to work together, stepping in where the other struggles, but we’re told Bryan’s strength without really seeing it in action.  That feels like a bit of a cheat, since we have seen previous examples of how Bryan’s talents could be applied to parenting.  I’d just have liked to see a little of the episode’s own theme playing out here.

However, the episode is still a lot of fun.  Shania (and later, some of her classmates) goes to town in demonstrating just what a handful kids can be, and the guys’ reactions to it are priceless.  I love Bryan all but stroking out listening to her endless demands, and for all of David’s “I’ve got everything under control” game plan, it’s funny to watch his resolve slowly crumble in the face of kids who are harder to wrangle than puppies.  There’s a running-with-scissors shot that’s gloriusly over-the-top, and I love Bryan’s overdramatic, extremely-extra way of dealing with the stress of the week.

All sorts of great lines.  Oftentimes, the show isn’t so much “laugh at loud funny” as it is “sweetly amusing,” but this episode is pretty comedic.  I love everything involving David’s panic at a bunch of kids going through his nightstand drawer, Bryan’s bedtime story involving seeing Uma Thurman at a gas station, and Goldie being unable to “stop eating the cucumber on [her] face.”

And if we’re looking for Andrew Rannells’s wonderful ability to rattle off the goofiest lines with complete sincerity, we’re treated to another scene on the set of Sing!, where he likens the set decoration to “a teen whorehouse in a John Hughes movie.”  Ha!