THE CRAZY ONES – Season 1 Episode 21 – SPOILERS

In the opening shot, the camera pans across a library shelf containing six of the ten volumes of Master Plots of World Literature, and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. We then see Simon (Robin Williams) reading a children’s book about creatures that are the last of their kind. (Williams, the last of the great American comedians, could well be commenting on himself.)

Back at the office, Gordon (Brad Garrett) is upset because UPS is dropping the agency. (This may be an indirect reference to rumours that CBS is considering dropping the show.) He tells Simon “…we have to replace them immediately, so everyone thinks we’re at the top of our game”. Sydney (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is less upset at the loss of the account. “We only had their hazardous shipping,” she says, and quotes the slogan: “We will touch it with a ten foot pole.”.

Simon has been convinced by Flora the Drunken Librarian (Melody Thomas Scott) that a library needs saving, and when Gordon denies him funding for the project, Simon comes up with the notion of using reverse psychology on the voters and promotes a book burning to celebrate the library’s demise. He puts Gordon’s face on the campaign, transforming him into a monster on which people could focus their hatred.

In the discussion that led up to Simon’s inspiration, when asked what libraries mean to them, Andrew suggests “bad wi-fi” and Lauren says libraries are “where homeless people masturbate”. Both are useful bits of knowledge.

Sydney is dating Dylan (Daniel Bess), the veterinarian in the apartment next to hers (whom she met in Episode 14), and when he visits her at the office, everyone but Sydney and Zach notice immediately that he’s gay.

ANDREW: We’ve got to tell her.
LAUREN: No. It’s the spinach in your teeth thing. If you tell someone, it could be really embarrassing.
ANDREW: What are you suggesting?
LAUREN: That we should just let the gay spinach work itself out of her teeth naturally. I mean, sooner or later he’s going to braid her hair, and then she’ll know. And then she won’t have to know that we ever knew.

Eventually, Dylan does braid Syd’s hair with the effect predicted by Lauren. Both Zach and Syd handle finding out about Dylan’s gayness very well.

Sydney twice has difficulty understanding Flora’s polysyllabic phrasings, implying that she has a limited vocabulary. This does not seem to be a good quality for someone involved in the writing of advertisements.

The campaign works. The library is saved, and eventually Gordon comes out a hero (as Simon and his Lauren-led chorus had promised). The agency gets great publicity resulting in many new accounts. It also gets a buyout offer from a Japanese corporation, which Gordon is inclined to accept, and to which Simon will never agree.

At episode’s end, Allie (Tiya Sircar) and Andrew are still together. A bromance develops between Zach and Dylan.

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NOTES

Tiya Sircar (Allie) will be Juliet in the pilot for the projected CBS series HOW I MET YOUR DAD, which will, if picked up, be a spinoff of How I Met Your Mother.

Daniel Bess (Dylan) is Denny in KITTENS IN A CAGE, a 1950’s style women-in-prison parody based on a play by Kelleen Conway Blanchard. According to director Jillian Armenante, the project will be shot like a feature film and cut into at least two seasons of webisodes.

Amanda Setton (Lauren) appeared in episode #44 of THE MINDY PROJECT which aired on 22 April on FOX. Her character, Shauna Dicarnio, had been absent from the show since January 2013.