Men of a Certain Age, "You Gonna Do That The Rest of Your Life?": Golf in the face of death

A review of last night's "Men of a Certain Age" coming up just as soon as I like to say "the journey"...

"Everyone's great under no pressure, but when you have a little pressure, only some people are great." -Joe

For an episode that opened with a death (albeit the death of a character we'd never heard of before) and had both Joe and Owen contemplating their own mortality, this one felt oddly lightweight. Not that "Men of a Certain Age" is ever that heavy of a show, but there's usually something more satisfying in the shaggy dog-ness of it all than I got last night.

A lot of that insubstantial feeling came from the Terry story. All three main characters have their inner conflicts that the show repeats over and over - Joe struggles with his anxiety, Owen is over-burdened and eats too much, Terry won't grow up - but Terry's always feels the most repetitive, in part because the character was the most familiar to begin with. Scott Bakula's fine, but there's often a predictability to the Terry plots (with occasional exceptions like last week's Big Brother story) that there isn't with the other two guys, and I saw every beat of this one coming, down to Terry using his previously-established knowledge of electrical work to start fixing things around the complex.

(It was fun, however, to watch the other characters react to Terry's usual obliviousness. Carla Gallo is doing some really interesting work as Annie, who knows exactly who and what Terry is and will overlook that, but only to a point she hasn't reached yet.)

Owen's story had some nice moments, as the running gag about his over-eating turned serious (though still offered us comedy like the sound of Andre Braugher saying "jicama" over and over), but like the story with Joe's dad last week, the resolution seemed a little too easy. The difference, of course, is that Braugher's a regular castmember and Robert Loggia isn't. So it's entirely possible we'll see Owen struggle and backslide and sneak some Fiddle Faddle in later episodes. But if this is it, too easy.

The episode's highlight, unsurprisingly, was the return of the Joe & Manfro comedy team (this time written by another "Everybody Loves Raymond" alum, Lew Schneider). I like that there's always this unsettling edge about how the two of them interact. Manfro seems like a goofball, but Joe's always afraid the guy could hurt him. Here, though, Manfro may have given him the inspiration to give the senior tour a try, and I liked the ambiguity of the final scene as compared to how Owen's story resolved. Joe seems determined to stay there all night until he hits 10 in a row, but it's also clear that he's going to be lucky to hit that many consecutively. And after spending so many weeks watching Joe be timid and uncomfortable(*), it was a pleasure to see him kicking ass and taking names on the back nine at the golf course.

(*) Speaking of which, I was glad to have Sarah Clarke back as Dory, but I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop with that character. Between the way Joe behaved on their first date in "Go with the Flow" and his creepy, morbid attitude at Terry's housewarming, I'm wondering why this woman hasn't backed away, very carefully.

No new show next week, with the season's penultimate episode airing on Feb. 15. It's a short season (in this economy, a lot of cable shows seem to be downsizing from 13 episodes to 10), but at least there's already a renewal in the bag so we know the next two won't be the last two.

What did everybody else think?