WILFRED Loses Its Sense of Direction in “Now”

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Wilfred gets a lot of credit just for being what it is – a man taking life lessons from a man in a dog suit. That’s a tough concept to sell. Whenever I try and explain to people what the show is about, I always gets the strangest looks, as if what I’m telling them couldn’t be farther away from what might be considered entertaining television. I can see where they’re coming from. Wilfred is definitely a tough nut to crack. It’s so much more than just a show about a man in a dog suit giving twisted moral lessons; it’s filthy; it’s funny; it’s dark. Most importantly, it’s not afraid. There are very few comedies currently on air I would describe as fearless – Louie, Community, Archer, immediately come to mind – and Wilfred is definitely one them. That being said, that fearlessness is not without its downsides. Taking a gamble on a story doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a success. If anything, it’s more likely to horribly backfire, as was the case for the majority of “Now.”

The big underlying problem of “Now” was the lack of any real supporting cast, especially of the female variety. Ryan and Wilfred need more to react to than just each other, and the one recurring character who did appear, played by Rob Riggle, has never clicked for me the way Allison Mack’s Amanda did. This was Riggle’s first episode where he had something of semi-value to do, but it just ended up not mattering. He plays these over-the-top characters in pretty much everything he does to the point I almost tend to just tune him out. But other than him, and his investor friend, we spent our time with Wilfred and Ryan and it hurt the show a bit. Without that interaction with meaningful people, whether it’s Jenna, Amanda, Kristin, or Drew, Wilfred can get lost in its own little world of bickering between its two stars. There needs to be at least one other person to come between them for things to really work. Riggle was not that third person this time around.

Things aren’t all bad though. I particularly liked the scene where Wilfred tried to convince Ryan he had a brain tumor and it was the cause of his hallucinations. To add on top of that Wilfred pulling out a gun and saying he was going to put Ryan out of his misery, only to reveal Wilfred was just screwing with Ryan, was brilliantly deranged. I kind of wish the episode could have carried on with that idea just a little bit more. The theme of the episode was living in the now and not worrying about the future, and having Ryan think he was dying would’ve been a much better way to explore that. What we ended up with was okay – Wilfred loses his sense of smell and thus his direction in life, slowly spiraling down self into actualization and depression, culminating in a new emo hairstyle and an attempted suicide by hanging. It’s a perfectly fine way to take the story; it just has that feeling of “This could’ve been better.”

2 Comments

1. 

   Titanius

   July 21, 2012 at 6:15 pm

   This was my favorite episode! It would have been great to see Jenna and Amanda this week but an episode of mainly Wilfred and Ryan is always nice. I really liked seeing intellectual Wilfred. After he changed to emo Wilfred I lost it. His answer machine message was hilarious. A coworker at Dish pointed out that the pictures on his phone kept changing when he was calling. I watched it a second time with my Dish Remote Access app and that made it even funnier.

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2. 

   Anonymous

   August 29, 2012 at 5:20 pm

   Personally I did not start watching Wilfred until I found out Allison Mack is going to star in the show. Once I started wathching the show, I really like the show. It’s interesting that Ryan get life advise from Wilfred and most of them make sense. However, as much as I love the dialog between Wilfred and Ryan, they do need to add a couple more charater to the show. One of them is definitely Amanda because she gives Ryan a sense of finally beloging. The other one is his sister who contantsly give Ryan a douse of reality, and lastly Jenna because if she leaves the show, then where will Wilfred be?

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