2 Broke Girls - 1x06 - And the Disappearing Bed

This one was pretty amusing. Still had it's godawful share of godawful jokes, but it looks like the cast and writers are finally getting into the groove of things. Earl is being integrated into the jokes a lot less awkwardly/non-racistly. Caroline has her trademark can-do attitude finally bite her in the ass. And Max, for the first time since the pilot, shows us why she's someone we would actually want to be friends with. She vigorously defends Caroline against a stingy tipper, without hesitation. She willingly opens up and share,about her relationship with Johnny, and takes responsibility for screwing up what should have been a simple talk with Peaches. All in all, this friendship is starting to feel real and not just like the result of sitcom-design-by-committee. It'd still be nice to see the day when Max finally gets on board with this whole bakery thing, instead of letting Caroline do all the damn work, and then whining about passing out a business card, but baby steps, I guess.

After a disastrous tip brings Caroline to her emotional breaking point, she decides it's time to hunker down and really get serious about this putting her life together thing. No more fooling around with well thought out business plans, financial rationing, networking, and seizing dynamic market opportunities. It's time to get real y'all. It's time for a vision board. The biggest item on her board is a Murphy Bed, so she can finally get a decent night's sleep in a proper bed, without disturbing Max's Friends-via-Williamsburg chic. The second biggest thing is not shown to the audience and measures 9 inches.

You're so cute when you act human

The third biggest thing on the board is a mockup of the bakery her and Max will hopefully have. She wants Max to believe that she deserves a bakery, just like Caroline deserves a bed. Max counters that wishing for something is not remotely the same as doing it and making it happen. On that note, when Max also mentions that Peaches (that ridiculous caricature of a UES mother she babysits for) is throwing a party for her twins birthday, Caroline insists that Max ask Peaches if they could cater the desserts for the party. Max is super hesitant about it, because god knows, pestering someone about actually doing something and actually actually doing something are not remotely the same thing. Caroline even has business cards made up so she can hand them to Peaches like they're a real business. Max, of course, poo-poos everything about the cards, from the Bakery's name to the fact there's a cherry on the cupcake in the picture. Of course when it's crunch time and she has to actually give a card to Peaches, she completely chokes. It's actually kind of adorable the way she completly loses the ability to even form a coherent sentence. See, vulnerable, human Max is something Kat Dennings does well. Hell, it doesn't even have to be vulnerable, just human, not a walking "BURN!" machine supplied with the lamest insults since According to Jim went off the air.

Raise your hand you'd rather buy this overpriced, outdated
physical medium than get food with spit in it.

Peaches doesn't seem to agree and completely ignores her rambling and walks away. Max comes back to the diner dejected and her usual old self. Caroline will have none of that, and to prove to her that the universe will provide (money) if you stand up for yourself, she, on the spot, completely quadruples sales of Earl's CDs by flat out lying to a bunch of hipsters about Earl's pedigree and history. It's actually pretty sweet, if a little reminiscent of how her father made all his money. "She even made up my damn last name," Earl muses. Seeing this somehow manages to inspire Max to sack up and summon all her courage to come back a second day and...drop the card on her desk while mumbling something about "a very exciting opportunity". Hey, at least she left the card.

Meanwhile, the Murphy Bed has arrived, delivered by Jesus himself. I'm sorry, Jesús. The Murphy Bed is the DIY variety, and Caroline swears she'll build the entire thing by herself before Max ever notices her entire living room has disappeared. Building an entire bed without even those prissy little Allen Wrenches from IKEA proves to be harder than she thought, and "before you know it" quickly morphs into days and days. Finally, Caroline breaks down and does "what every pretty girl in the history of the world has done" and asked a guy. But wait, she doesn't know any guys in Williamsburg, as Max points out. Who did she call? Why she called Johnny, the buff hipster bartender-slash-street artist who guys by the name JPEG (ugh).

Because exhibiting a penchant for biting the tips off phallic
objects doesn't ever send men running out the door.

Max freaks the fuck out. Seems her and JPEG (ugh) are currently in a weird kind of place after an uncomfortable celery stalk biting incident. I wish that a euphemism. She invited him to the diner (as apparently she always does), he tips her with a napkin drawing, and somehow their flirting leads to him holding up a celery stalk as a faux microphone in some kind of interview that's not really all that clever. So Max responds as she always responds to a situation she doesn't understand: she bites the head off it. Sorta seductively, sorta awkwardly. Mostly awkwardly. JPEG (ugh) gets the hell out of there and doesn't look back. At least until Caroline invites him back to their place to build her bed with his manly tools. That probably sounded a lot dirtier than however it was Caroline actually worded it. I assume. Is there a better way to word that?

Not even the horse likes those stupid glasses.

So Caroline runs around helping Max take down all the gillion of napkin drawings that are covering the apartment ("How did I not notice so many of them before!?"), just in time for JPEG's (ugh) arrival. Max insist he not help her because she's a spoiled little brat used to people doing things for herself. So instead, he just goes out to the yard to hang out with the horse. That's kind of rude. He came all the way there to help her. He brought tools. Not even a "she's kind of scary and has sharp teeth, so I wanna do what she says", he just shambles towards the yard like that was his plan all along? Anyway, him and Max (and Chestnut) start a fire (really?) and have a nice night chat, chilling, having really lame cowboy-related banter. I mean really lame. Are they trying to be realistic in that real people aren't always that clever, or do the writers think this is engrossing? Whatever. Max finally gets up the nerve to ask him what was up with the celery thing, like Caroline was egging her to, and he says it was "intense intense". Then they decide to get on the horse, because, why not? He looks like he's going in for a kiss, and then Max almost falls off Chestnut, and he grabs to steady her, and gets a palm full of boob. Let's face it, Max, when it comes to the total surface-area of your torso, it was statistically unlikely for him to not grab boob. Being the smooth operator he is, he instantly splits. Again.

"They call me JPEG. 'Click'..."

Freaked out over having two weird moments with him, plus the Peaches fiascoes, Max melodramatically declares that trying sucks and she's done showing her cards to anyone "literal or emotional". A few hours later, still trying to build the bed and being reduced to using one of her expensive heels as a hammer, Caroline agrees that trying sucks and starts to pout and cry, which is really the first time in six episodes we've ever seen her actually act like a spoiled rich girl. Max takes curmudgeonly pity on her and helps her build the bed, as long as Caroline swears there will be no bonding involved. One long, bondless night(?) later, the bed is completed, if a little mouse-trappy, and it looks ... like a giant conspicuous box in the middle of the living room. I wonder if they're going to decorate it a bit to make it fit into the decor more, or if it'll just be this flatboard(?) monolith thing in the middle of the room.

Totally goes with the place.

Just as they're celebrating Max's low-key taping of the bakery image onto her "vision beam", Caroline's cell rings. It's Peaches, she found the card, has "no idea where it came from", but is interested about what they can offer. When Peaches finds out they don't really have experience, she rudely hangs up, further cementing Max's dour outlook on trying. But Caroline looks at it differently: the cards worked. Someone called. That just means they just have to keep giving cards out until someone calls who'll actually hire them. That's actually a pretty decent way of looking at things.