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| TV Reviews | |
better than you'd think Theme of older women with younger men is tired Oct 28, 2009
In the series, airing on ABC on Wednesdays 9:30, Courteney Cox plays the titular feline, defined in online dictionaries (though not yet in print ones) as an attractive woman, 40 or older, who has predatory relationships with younger men. The emergence of the “cougar” in pop culture is, according to The New York Times, based in real life: A growing (if still small) percentage of middle-aged women are dating or married to younger men. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t already a tired theme—witness Samantha’s dull relationship with Smith in the waning episodes of “Sex and the City”—long before anyone coined the term. Whether or not the trendy-sounding title helped sell the show, the executive producer, Bill Lawrence (“Scrubs”), seems relatively uninterested in exploring that theme. (In fact, the title has a second meaning: The local high school football team is the Cougars.) The first episode, in which Julie (Cox), a divorced mother and real estate agent living in Florida, went on a manhunt with her younger co-worker Laurie (Busy Philipps), was a standard sex farce that drew on many of the stereotypes of the older-woman-meets-younger-man plot. In the first scene, Julie stared at her body in the mirror, tugging at various saggy parts. One could imagine millions of women looking at the still gorgeous and skinny Cox and saying, “Oh, shut up!” (Or words to that effect.) That self-deprecation aside, Cox is just as appealing as when she played Monica on “Friends.” Julie, in fact, could be a fortysomething Monica, if you can imagine that Monica got pregnant by her golf-pro boyfriend and dropped out of college to marry him and raise their son. By the second episode, Julie is dating Josh (Nick Zano), who, like most of the younger boyfriends in TV shows and movies of this type, is an impossibly handsome nonentity. The first plotline was familiar: Julie decided to make Josh wait 10 dates before they could consummate their relationship. The absence of a compelling romance allows the show to highlight Julie’s relationships with the other characters. Christa Miller (“Scrubs,” “The Drew Carey Show”) plays Julie’s best friend, Ellie, who has an affectionate if lukewarm relationship with her husband, Andy (Ian Gomez). Ellie is more emotionally involved with Julie than she is with her newborn, with whom she is having trouble bonding: “We have completely different tastes in food, music and books,” she says. Julie’s ex-husband, Bobby (Brian Van Holt), specializes in embarrassing both Julie and their son, Travis (Dan Byrd). He drives a golf cart around town and lives in a boat parked within view of the ocean. The boat’s name is Jealous Much? Julie is carrying on a flirtation with a recently divorced neighbor, Grayson (Josh Hopins), who is serial-dating younger women. “When women get older, it’s icky,” he tells Julie. “When men get older, it’s adorable. It’s actually my favorite double standard.” As he did in “Scrubs,” Lawrence manages to blend farce and real feelings. Characters that could be one-note turn out to be more complex, but without stopping the flow of comedy. "Cougar Town" is more than just cougars and Cox, and that's what makes it the well-played, well-written comedy that it is.
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