TV Recap: “Cougar Town,” ‘Two Gunslingers’
November 20th, 2009 by 
megconno
image courtesy abc.com
It was Jules’s 41st birthday this week on Cougar Town and as a present we got a great pair of guest stars: Rachael Harris and Alan Ruck. (Can’t you tell from the back of his head?)
Harris and Ruck played a married couple, Shanna and Frank, that Jules and Bobby were friends with when they were married. Jules runs into them at the beach and has an unfortunate incident with a wet, white bikini. When she tries to apologize later, Jules finds out that Shanna has a whole litany of reasons for disliking her now and has spread it around to her whole “weird mom gang.”
Jules decides to get away from it all by going to Playa del Roca with Ellie and Laurie for her birthday. It takes some negotiation to get them to go together because they still dislike each other. A couple of weeks ago I talked about wanting Jules’s best friends to bond and start to like each other and Jules really wanted that this episode too. In an effort to please her for her birthday, they try to fake a bonding moment after Jules gets fed up with all their squabbling. In that moment, I realized that I actually didn’t want them to be friends at all. Ellie and Laurie are way more fun when they’re at each other’s throats.
They did manage to team up in one pleasing way. Shanna and Frank were also at the resort, in an effort on Frank’s part to soothe Shanna over the white bikini incident. Apparently, Shanna once asked Frank which one of her friends he would get with if she died and he picked Jules. He also sometimes sees Jules’s legs (but not her face) when he and Shanna have sex. Which he also told Shanna. This, complied with a topless hot tub incident, explains her new hostility toward Jules. So, Ellie and Laurie get together to put a collaborative smackdown on “Shah-na.” As Laurie threatens: “seriously, I fight all the time. She will hold your arms and I will beat you until your Spanx are the only thing holding your torso together.” I hope that isn’t enough to run Shanna out of town, though, because Rachael Harris would be a great addition to the cast and I can never get enough Alan Ruck.
The best subplot of the night was definitely the Grayson-Travis dynamic. Travis loves making fun of Grayson just as much as Jules does and we get a nice mother-son dig near the beginning of the episode. “Mommy, if that lady slept over at Mr. Ellis’s house, does that mean they’re in love?” “Well, he loves parts of her, sweetie.” High five!
The plot thickens when Grayson promises to look in on Travis while Jules is away for the weekend. Travis doesn’t really think he needs a babysitter – “if the house is on fire, you may knock once. If I don’t answer, assume I set the fire, and I want to burn to death” – but Grayson ends up checking on him and kicking a girl out once Andy scares him into following Jules’s orders with a horror story about pecan-filled brownies. (He’s allergic.)
Travis retaliates by “pretending to come out to Grayson to mess with his head,” as Andy gleefully reports to Jules. After a long, long talk Travis gets Grayson to admit that he once practiced kissing with his cousin Ben. Grayson even ends up paying Travis fifty bucks to keep his silence, after he’s already told Andy. Awww, poor Grayson.
