One of the hardest things to do in television is make an asshole a sympathetic character. Making a villain sympathetic is one thing, but an arrogant jackass that we’re supposed to care about is a hard thing to accomplish. This season, Party Down has done a good job of making their resident arrogant jackass, Roman, a character that has always been prickly to say the least. Even last season, when he had a crush on Casey, he was more a jerky hurdle to Henry’s own efforts to patch up things with her after the Rick Fox Incident (Party Down plot or awful ska band?). But this season, we’ve seen Roman torn down frequently, and though he’s still arrogant and frequently a jerk, I genuinely felt bad for him in “Joel Munt’s Big Deal Party.”
We learned from Steve Guttenberg’s party that Roman is not a very good writer, but he sees everyone else as hacks in comparison to his perceived genius. So it makes sense that he’d fire a writing partner, the titular Joel Munt (Human Giant‘s Paul Scheer), who would make it big and subsequently hire Party Down to cater a party to humiliate his former partner. Roman is obviously distraught, not only that Joel made it big, but because he’s adapting a trilogy of books by one of his favorite authors, A.F. Gordon Theodore (Freaks and Geeks‘ Dave “Gruber” Allen). Roman wants his revenge, and through the suggestion of Kyle, plans to pee in his rival’s champagne. But it keeps ending up in the wrong hands and, and despite the invocation of “The Code” to Henry and Ron, he can’t get the job done. He finally gets the best of Joel by instilling a little doubt in A.F.’s mind about he adaptation, but he gets tricked, in an actually nice moment, into giving Joel the answer to his problems, leaving poor Roman to watch his idol and rival speed away in an SUV filled with girls.
While Kyle is mostly concerned with helping Roman get his revenge, Ron is working to re-establish himself as team leader, instituting his sets of RDDs – Ron Donald Dos and Ron Donald Don’ts. Naturally, Ron has no idea that he’s using the same acronym for both, and naturally, the rest of the crew mocks him. Henry and Casey, meanwhile, are concentrating on hooking up in the van, a task that proves difficult given that the keys are inside of the locked van. To prove himself a man to Casey, who previously called him the woman in the relationship, Henry tries in vain to get the door open. This collides with Ron’s first day back as team leader, as in a desperate attempt to get into the van, smashes the window of Joel Munt’s car. In fantastic Party Down fashion, it is just then that Henry finds the keys on the ground. Lydia wasn’t too involved with the rest of the Party Downers, mostly because thanks to a bathroom misunderstanding, she was going crazy on coke, which (as pointed out by the AV Club) was a story that was used for her character predecessors, Constance and Bobbi, but no less funny.
The two guests, Scheer and Allen, were both bright spots in the episode. Scheer did a great job at turning up the jackass dial to 11 as Joel Munt, but he also had a great scene with Martin Starr in the kitchen was pretty genuine and for a while, I was convinced that Joel wouldn’t do the inevitable and steal Roman’s idea. Allen too was great, hitting all the right notes as the dorky sci-fi writer that is too smart and socially inept to navigate a Hollywood party. Martin Starr gave his best performance of the show in this episode, and as he watched Munt and A.F. drive away, I genuinely felt bad for him.
But the rest of the episode was a little flat for me. I thought the Lydia bits were funny (particularly her interaction with Bubbles from The Wire, but Casey and Henry were largely absent, and Ron’s story didn’t really go that far. The main plot with Roman was great, but without a funny secondary story, the episode stalled at a couple points. Party Down has been fantastic this season, and this episode fell short of the awesomeness of the preceding episodes. But with two more episodes to go, I’m looking for PD to bounce back, and almost assuredly leave us with a depressingly comic ending to the season.
Michael’s Score: 74
TUiW Grade: B
Michael
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