While “Wedding Thrashers” looks like it was more fun to make than it is to watch, it’s still pretty fun to watch. Adam, Blake, and Ders (after some beery bar “backupuncture” with a dart goes wrong) get rescued and befriended by a pair of beautiful ladies led by Hillary Winthrop (Ashley Hinshaw from Chronicle), whose dad is the super-rich “King of Rancho,” and who inexplicably takes a shine to Adam. I say ”inexplicably” not out of any disrespect to Adam DeMamp (although his armpits do smell like vomit, apparently), but because Hillary is so obviously playing a game of some sort that the episode needs the maturity, wealth, and attractiveness gap between the two to be so large it immediately sets off sitcom trope bells. It’s just a matter of which bell is being rung—is Hillary just nuts? Doing a Dinner Game/Dinner For Schmucks number? Trying to make someone jealous? So when it turns out that she’s really a lesbian trying to prove to her overbearing father how preferable it is that she openly date her best friend Jackie by inviting Adam as her date to her sister’s wedding, it should be both mean and hackneyed. But “Wedding Thrashers” is so slight and good-natured an episode that Adam being held up for ridicule as the worst case scenario for heterosexuality stays essentially benign.
Maybe it’s the Gravitron that does it. As the main item on the 12-year-old Adam’s bachelor party bucket list, the vomit-inducing carnival ride is the episode’s centerpiece—and the element that makes “Wedding Thrashers” seem like an episode whose primary raison d’etre was so the creative team could rent a Gravitron and ride around in it all day with a sexy lady in her underwear. (Young Adam’s fantasy, naturally included a sexy stripper giving him a lap dance during the ride.) While this season has seen Workaholics tentatively exploring the guys’ vulnerabilities, the only real nod to deconstructing the reasons for their hedonistic, insular lifestyle here is Adam’s initial refusal to accompany the seemingly perfect Hillary to the wedding, his childish unwillingness to give Ders and Blake their dream entree to the world of wealth, hot girls, and endless buffalo pizza a function of his fear of losing his friends and their life of eternally postponed adulthood. (There’s also the sense that he feels overmatched by the too-good-to-be-true Hillary.) His delight in their one, last spree (which includes shooting a mini-fridge with a shotgun, chopping down a tree, drinking with airline pilots, and microwaving a hamster—thankfully he outgrew that one) is so infectious that it renders any pesky introspection largely moot.
It’s 20-plus minutes packed with not one, but two, extended musical montages (in addition to the guys’ dizzy adventures with Jenny Shakeshaft’s game stripper Brooklyn, the initial sequence doing body shots and dancing with Hillary and Jackie looks like a fun filming night), the episode stays on the surface, which isn’t really a complaint. Workaholics, at its heart, is a show about three friends who, as Blake fantasizes tonight about his plans for a life of luxury, “never have to work again.” So when Hillary drops her truth-bomb in response to the Adam disrupting the wedding—with the good news that he couldn’t get hard even being ground on by Brooklyn on the Gravitron because of his love for her—Adam’s potential heartbreak passes pretty painlessly. (“Define lesbian!,” he shouts hopefully as the guys are being chased out of the church.)
Sometimes, a decent Workaholics is just a fun, forgettable ride.
Stray observations:
- Considering Workaholics’ proclivities toward bodily fluid comedy, the fact that a night on the Gravitron does not end up with everyone covered in barf is another reason why “Wedding Thrashers” is a pleasant surprise.
- “Hilary, wait. I never caught your name.” “I think you did because you just said it.”
- Blake, imagine a rich person’s wedding: “They probably serve, like, tiger meat or something cool.”
- Poor decisions “single Adam” has made: eating a ”toilet donut,” doing too many whippets at a 2 Chainz concert and trying to put his pants on a police horse.
- “I’m having a hard time getting hard as of late, but hopefully your daughter changes that. The love for your daughter killed my boner!” Adam truly is every prospective father-in-law’s dream.
- It might be a thankless role, but Jenny Shakeshaft’s Brooklyn is one of the most sensible strippers I’ve seen on TV recently. Neither particularly dumb nor especially mercenary, Brooklyn seems like the best carnival-ride stripper companion the guys could have hoped for under the circumstances.
- Having maxed out his credit card on the spree, Blake has to strip at Brooklyn’s friend’s bachelorette party. He’s very enthusiastic, I’ll give him that.
- It’s a nice touch that we never see the guys cut down the tree—part way through the night, there’s just a tree on top of Ders’ Vo’.
- While the pilots can’t let Adam fly in their plane, one of them does give him an airplane (the thing where you’re lifted in the air by someone’s feet on your tummy). It’s pretty adorably something the 12-year-old Adam would enjoy.
- Blake’s was some great wedding tackle. Oh, wait.