Transcript for Episode 47: Grace's Father in Law Is Gay... and Also Dead

This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Grace Under Fire episodes “Emmet’s Secret” and “Emmet, We Hardly Knew Ye.” If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here. The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.

Grace:  Have you always been gay, or did you just—you know, like pick up a brochure one day? 

[audience laughs] 

Emmet:  Oh. Grace, when I was growing up, I- I didn't even know what a gay person was. 

Glen:  Somebody had to hang the streamers at the school dance. 

[audience laughs with increasing enthusiasm]

Emmet:  I—I did. Yeah. 

["Perfect World" performed by Michael O'Brien plays]

Drew:  Hello, and welcome to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast where we talk about the LGBT-focused episodes of classic sitcoms—which is to say the very special episodes that also happen to be very queer episodes. I'm Drew Mackie. 

Glen:  I'm Glen Lakin. 

Drew:  And in case that intro did not tip you off, today we are talking about Grace Under Fire. 

Glen:  Not to be confused with "Grace On Fire." 

Drew:  That was—not a show. 

Glen:  Yet. 

Drew:  I mean, reboot, I guess. Glen, what are your memories of this show? 

Glen:  I remember watching it, perhaps weekly. What sticks out most to me is when her son, Quentin, went from a child to being a teenager, and then I think it was just the last season when her first child that she gave up for adoption became a character. 

Drew:  That's either fourth or fifth. I can't remember which. But yeah, that also happens. 

Glen:  So yeah, I guess I remember all the re-tooling most. Oddly, it wasn't until I rewatched this episode that it all came flooding back to me—like all the different side characters. 

Drew:  I think people would be surprised to be reminded how popular this show was. This was a very popular, very successful show that only lasted for five seasons due to—at this point, I'll just say "technical difficulties"—and it kind of vanished. I think it was in syndication for a little bit, but you don't really see it in syndication anymore. It didn't really leave much of a footprint, but this was a very popular show. 

Glen:  Drew, for people who don't know, what is Grace Under Fire about? 

Drew:  Grace Under Fire is an ABC sitcom that starred Brett Butler as Grace Kelly.

Glen:  Not that Grace Kelly. 

Drew:  Not that Grace Kelly. There's actually a joke in I think the first episode where she identifies herself as "I never won an Oscar, but I'm a better driver." 

Glen:  Yikes. 

Drew:  [Grace] is divorced, works at an oil refinery, has three children, and is trying to get by and put on a happy face. She's also a recovering alcoholic. 

Glen:  And she's divorced because of an abusive marriage, which is often a plot point in the show. 

Drew:  Yes. And he is also a recovering alcoholic. 

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  They were trying to out-Conner the Conners, sort of. 

Glen:  Yeah. I think setting it in—Missouri, is it?—was  a step. Remembering that it's in Missouri made this episode in which Grace and her boyfriend travel to St. Louis for a weekend—

Drew:  In the big city. 

Glen:  Yeah. It makes a little more sense. 

Drew:  Yeah. It was just a kind of character that I don't recall seeing anywhere else on TV during the '90s. I think that's maybe why people embraced her? But it was also a pretty funny show. She was good at delivering one-liners, and the writing was actually a lot better than you might remember. 

Glen:  Yeah. I was thinking about the differences between this and "The John Goodman Show," and I think Brett Butler was able to deliver a lot of Roseanne-type humor without the mugging for camera. It just seemed more in character with her, and there was a lot more expression and physicality to delivery of her jokes. 

Drew:  Yeah. And she doesn't look anything like Roseanne. She's taller. She's blonde. But the way she presents herself is kind of self-effacing, and her delivery—she has a very low voice, and by that nature alone, the way she's giving you words is going to be very different than how Roseanne Barr gives you words. 

Glen:  Also, the kids have less of a role than in Roseanne, whereas in Roseanne they each had very big personalities that fit in well with the family structure. Here, the kids are sort of ornaments. 

Drew:  I am going to say some nice things in favor of the daughter when we get to her, but yeah, it's somewhere between Roseanne and Everybody Loves Raymond in terms of what the kids get to do. 

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  The kids get a scene in one of the two episodes we're discussing in this episode and—

Glen:  I know what scene you're talking about. 

Drew:  I like that scene. 

Glen:  It's a beautiful scene. 

Drew:  Also, I was thinking about it and this is one of the only instances of a '90s sitcom based around a stand-up where the character was not named the same name as that comedian has, like Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne, Ellen, Martin—even Everybody Loves Raymond, the character is named "Ray," and this is Brett Butler. 

Glen:  "Cliff Huxtable." 

Drew:  That's not the '90s. 

Glen:  I know. I thought you said '80s or '90s. I don't actually listen. There's a spiderweb in between us, and I just stare at a spiderweb instead of listening to your words. 

Drew:  That's our guest, Glen. 

Glen:  Oh. 

Drew:  I was going to make a big entrance for him and you kind of blew that one, so I'm just going to skip over that. My guess as to why the character might not have been named "Brett Butler" is that that was also the name of a baseball player for the Marlins who was around also in the '90s. 

Glen:  Also, a man's name. Would have been confusing. 

Drew:  Also, very close to "Rhett Butler," which was also confusing when I was a kid. Brett Butler got her start in TV in 1987. She was a writer for Dolly, the Dolly Parton variety show that lasted—not long, unfortunately. I've never seen an episode of it. I kind of want to search one down, and maybe I'll post whatever I can find in social media. 

Glen:  Maybe we'll do an episode about it. 

Drew:  I'm sure it's pretty gay. Fannie Flagg is one of the writers—or performers. I can't actually remember. I don't know if Brett Butler was ever on screen for however long the Dolly variety show was around for, but that's where she got her start. Then she ended up clawing her way to getting her own sitcom, as many comedians did in the '90s. It was a hit. It was the fifth most-watched show the first season it was on, which was the '93 – '94 season. It was only behind 60 Minutes, Home Improvement, Seinfeld, and Roseanne, in that order. It was the fifth most-watched show. 

Glen:  That's crazy. 

Drew:  The following season, it was the fourth most-watched show. It did better than Roseanne. It even did better than Friends, which was in its first season at the time. The third season is the season we're talking about, and it was the 13th most-watched show, which is fine. Then the fourth season it was 45th, and the fifth season 68th. It was canceled abruptly mid-plotline in February of the fifth season, which is a bummer. 

Glen:  Yeah. One of the supporting cast members left during that season as well, I believe. 

Drew:  So Julie White plays Nadine, and we'll talk about her in a bit. She left the show, and there's an article about Entertainment Weekly about the downfall of Grace Under Fire and what the fuck happened. It is not her saying it as a represent of the show off the record or anonymously. It says, "It's very hard to play the best friend of someone who you really don't like in real life." 

Glen:  I agree. 

Drew:  Yeah. Oh, is that why—fuck you! [laughter] I am the Nadine; you are the Brett Butler in this thing. 

Glen:  Really?!

Drew:  Yes. 

Glen:  Okay. Huh.

Drew:  Yes. I'm the good one. 

Glen:  Oh. Okay. I am the disaster. 

Drew:  Yeah, usually, wreaking havoc on me, and I'm subject to all your—

Glen:  Schemes? 

Drew:  Schemes, plots—

Glen:  Relationship disasters? 

Drew:  —tirades.

Glen:  Oh, yeah. 

Drew:  Sleep punchings—yeah. Just so we're clear on that. She was replaced by Lauren Tom, who is better known as Julie from Friends or Amy from Futurama. Then she also disappeared, and she was replaced by Julia Duffy, and then they were just trying to figure out who this Julia Duffy character was going to be, and then the show got canceled and that was the end of it. We'll just talk about the Quentin thing in detail when we get to the kids, when they make their entrance. Around the fourth season she was having a problem with pain killers, and she was hospitalized for it. She got better for a bit and then relapsed again. Actually, her problems delayed the filming of the fifth season. It didn't start airing until November, so it really was not along for very long before it got canceled. They tried to make it work, and it just did not happen. Womp womp. 

Glen:  But Brett Butler was in a show you were watching recently. 

Drew:  She has been in a lot of stuff. I was flipping through channels and How to Get Away with Murder was on, and she plays the mother of the four kids who are helping or stopping someone getting away—I don't really know the show. But the stunningly beautiful African-American female student character, Brett Butler plays her mom. That's a casting decision I would not have guessed coming, but she was really acting, which was surprising. She was also on The Young and the Restless, The Leftovers, and The Walking Dead. One of those resulted in her character being decapitated and her head being put on a pike. Can you guess which one? 

Glen:  The Young and the Restless. 

Drew:  That's it! That's true. This is a Chuck Lorre show. 

Glen:  That also surprised me. 

Drew:  I did not know that. This is the first Chuck Lorre show that was successful. The very first was called Franny's Turn. It aired for five episodes on 1992 on CBSS and starred Miriam Margoyles, which I'd never heard of it until now. He followed up with this, and it was a hit. Not thinking of it as a Chuck Lorre show, I was surprised by how much DNA it has in common with the more famous Chuck Lorre shows (which include Cybil, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Mike & Molly, and Mom) in that there's that biting-edge to the humor where people say mean things but it's okay because they kind of love each other. Also, it's like an extended family of weirdos and everyone gets to come together in one place, and they're all kind of like an oddly broken, extended family. Does that make sense? 

Glen:  Yeah. There's no reason everyone's always hanging out in Grace's house because she probably has the worst house of all of them. 

Drew:  Yeah, like Wade and Nadine live next door, and we see their house. The house is nicer. Like, you should decorate your own tree, guys. But everyone's just at Grace's house because they have no life without Grace. Like, in a literary sense that's actually true because that's how it works. Chuck Lorre, famous TV creator, also wrote the theme song to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. 

[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme plays]

Glen:  I owe him so much. 

Drew:  Isn't that weird? That would be enough for anyone to be like, "Well, I left my mark on the world," and then he ended up probably making a bigger contribution to pop culture by creating all those shows. 

Glen:  It just shows he's good at creating memorable character types—or boiling down character types into memorable phrases. 

Drew:  [laughs] That theme song explains it all very succinctly. If you listen to that theme song and you're not clear on who's who—

Glen:  I mean, Grace Kelly is cool but crude. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. And Grandma Jean is a party dude—she's not, at all. No. We're talking about two episodes—

Glen:  Back-to-back!

Drew:  —which is not something we've ever done before, but we're doing it because they tie in very well together, and it's kind of the setup and the follow-up to a major plot point, and I want to talk to Glen about any reason he could imagine for why these aired as closely as they did. But the episodes are—this episode we're talking about we're just going to call "Grace Under Fire's Father-in-Law." 

Glen:  You don't think you can just say, "Grace's Father-in-Law is a Secret Gay"? 

Drew:  Oh. I was going to say, "Grace's Father-in-Law is Gay and Dead," because it's a nice follow-up to the previous episode. The episodes are "Emmet's Secret," which aired December 5, 1995. 

Glen:  The spoiler of the secret is that he's gay. 

Drew:  Yeah. The second episode is called "Emmet, We Hardly Knew Ye." It was the next episode that aired, but it aired on December 20. Couldn't find any Nielsen ratings for the first one, but the second episode was the tenth most-watched piece of TV that week drawing 13.1 million people. It was still doing pretty well in the third season. First one, "Emmet's Secret," directed by Michael Lessac, who's done a ton of TV directing and also directed the pilots for Taxi, Newhart, The Drew Carey Show, Naked Truth, Just Shoot Me, Everybody Loves Raymond, and George & Leo. It was written by Donald Beck, who wrote and executive produced for Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place, 8 Simple Rules, and Reba. He also produced that slasher movie Cutting Class with early Brad Pitt. 

Glen:  Ooh!

Drew:  Have you ever seen that? 

Glen:  No. 

Drew:  It's—

Glen:  Okay. 

Drew:  Yeah. It's a thing that you can watch if you want to. 

Glen:  It exists. 

Drew:  Yeah. Second one also directed by Michael Lessac, written by J. J. Wall, who wrote for Blossom, The John Larroquette Show and who plays Anne's grabby uncle, Paul, on Arrested Development. I did not realize that was a character that existed, but he appears in three seasons of Arrested Development as Anne's gross uncle who touches people too much. 

Glen:  Huh. 

Drew:  Yeah. Weird, right? 

Glen:  I kind of wish I was born two decades earlier so I could have a career just jumping around sitcoms. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Glen:  Like, what a dream. What a dream. 

Drew:  They probably didn't appreciate it for what it was. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah. Jerks. Is there anything else we need to get in here as preface? Have we adequately explained Grace Under Fire to the people? 

Glen:  I mean, I guess we'll get into it when we talk about the episode, but two of the characters in the show are her in-laws, which I had to double check when I was watching. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. We are basically introduced to them right away at the first scene of the first episode. The first scene of the first episode, we see Rick, who is her boyfriend all through this season. They break up at the end of the season. He's trying to get her to come down because they're going on a road trip to St. Louis. Rick is played by Alan Autry, a distant relative to Gene Autry. Do you recognize him from anything? Because you should. 

Glen:  Kind of. 

Drew:  Yeah. You should. 

Glen:  Is it a superhero thing? 

Drew:  No. 

Glen:  Oh, well. 

Drew:  He actually plays a very prominent role in an episode we've already discussed in Gayest Episode Ever, and there's a weird mirroring to the sports bar scene—because he plays Sam Malone's gay baseball teammate who comes out in "The Boys in the Bar." 

Glen:  Yes! 

Drew:  And so it's interesting to see that actor playing someone on the other side of a very similar situation. So, yes. 

Glen:  Sporty and gay. 

Drew:  Sporty and gay. Did not foresee this man appearing twice. Also, he's a former football player, which is a weird throughline. As you might guess from the way people look on Grace Under Fire, a lot of people were athletes who later turned to acting after the fact. 

Glen:  Think they were inspired by O.J. Simpson—to go into acting, not to do some of the other things that he did—or may have done. 

Drew:  May—probably did. Yeah. That's a weird thing to think about. Probably, there were a lot of people who decided, like, "If O.J. can do it, I can do it," and then they probably later regretted saying that exact sentence out loud. 

Glen:  In front of police. 

Drew:  Yeah. Probably O.J. Naked Gun is a really funny movie.

Glen:  It's fantastic. While Grace is gone for the weekend, the plan is to have Grandma Jean (her mother-in-law) and Emmet (her father-in-law) watch the kids, but Grace is horrified to learn that Emmet is going out of town on a fishing trip and it'll just be Grandma Jean who, as you can read in the scene, Grace does not have a good relationship with. 

Jean:  I cannot believe that you are deserting your children and running off to St. Louis with some man

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  It's not just "some man," Jean. That happens to be the fourth one I interviewed. 

[audience laughs] 

Jean:  And you are very welcome for me taking care of the children, Grace. 

Grace:  I'm sorry. Thank you both. I really appreciate it. 

Emmet:  Oh, Grace, I'm sorry. I thought you knew. I'm going fishing. 

Grace:  What? 

Jean:  Well, I'm perfectly capable of taking care of the children alone. 

Grace:  Jean, listen to yourself. You're not making sense, woman. 

[audience laughs] 

Drew:  They are probably the most interesting dynamic on the show, and very shortly after the episodes we're going to be talking about she becomes a regular and moves in with Grace—I think because they realized that what they had between them was just very funny because they could be very mean to each other, and there's really nothing they could say to each other that really seemed over the line whereas she  couldn't really say things like that to Nadine or anyone else. 

Glen:  Or her children. 

Drew:  [laughs] No. I mean, maybe. 

Glen:  Yeah. Grandma Jean is a devout Christian and obviously disapproves of Grace divorcing her son. 

Drew:  And she does not acknowledge that her son was physically abusive towards Grace. She's basically everything that's wrong with white women. She's played very well by—I think it's Peggy "Ray," R-E-A, but it might be "Ree-ah" or—

Glen:  No, I think it's Peggy "Ray." 

Drew:  Peggy Rea was a recurring character on I Love Lucy, so she's been in this business for a very long time. She also was recurring on The Waltons and played Lulu Hogg on The Dukes of Hazard. 

Glen:  Who was she on I Love Lucy? 

Drew:  She's one of the friends. It says "club girl" or something, but she shows up in a few different episodes. I think a saw a screengrab where she was playing bridge. 

Glen:  Yeah, I was going to say was she playing bridge. 

Drew:  Yeah, I think so. 

Glen:  They do that. 

Drew:  She's probably most famous to people who are like me and Glen as being Susanne Somers's mother on Step by Step before she got blinked out of existence—

Glen:  For that first season. 

Drew:  —and never mentioned again. Probably died in a fire. 

Glen:  Yeah. Yeah. Where's that hair salon in the garage? 

Drew:  But they bring the hair salon back when Bronson Pinchot joins the show, so it's like, they had characters to work in the—whatever. Yeah. So the sister and the mom are never mentioned again, but they are in the first season. They're in the opening credits. 

Glen:  Yeah. They're terrified of the children on the roller coaster. 

Drew:  Yeah, as I would be. Oh, she's also in What's the Matter with Helen?, which is that exploitation movie with Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds, which I encourage everyone to watch. Don't watch Cutting Class with Brad Pitt. Watch What's the Matter with Helen? Instead. Good film. Also, in the way that Grace Kelly is a joke, Jean Kelly is also a joke. Her name is Jean Kelly—Grandma Jean. So she was on the show more than Emmet was. We see Emmet come in shortly after we're introduced to Grandma Jean. He was only in four episodes. 

Glen:  Really?

Drew:  This is the last episode he ever appeared in. He's not as much of a character, and he likes Grace, and they actually get along kind of okay, and they have an understanding, so there's just not as much comedic potential there. He's played by Matt Clark, who played the uncle in Return to Oz. I think that's probably the thing I most recognize from him. He's mostly done Westerns, which makes sense given the kind of actor he is. They have a line at the beginning  that Grandma Jean does not like road trips because of all the stops at rest stops. 

Jean:  We made you some sandwiches for the road. 

Rick:  Yeah? Well, thanks Jean. Thanks Emmet. You didn't have to do that. 

Jean:  Oh, you don't want to go on a romantic weekend and eat at truck stops. 

Emmet:  You've been throwing that honeymoon in my face for 40 years. 

[audience laughs] 

Drew:  Is that—is that the first gay joke they make? 

Glen:  Maybe? 

Drew:  Like, why else is he stopping at every rest stop? That doesn't seem in character. It's just an odd—

Glen:  Yeah. I didn't read it as a gay joke. I read "meat lobby" as the first gay joke. 

Drew:  Oh. We're about to get to that, but first we meet all the kids because Jean has told the children that Grace is getting something removed from the body at the hospital and that's why she's going out of town because she's horrified that Grace is going out of town with her boyfriend—

Glen:  Whom she is not married to to have extramarital sex. 

Drew:  So she brings the kids down and is like, "Okay. This is what's actually happening," and they are entirely cool with it. So the kids are Quentin, Libby, and Patrick. Patrick is those damn Sprouse twins again. 

Glen:  The baby. Really? 

Drew:  Yes! This is the first thing they did. This is what led to them getting that role on Big Daddy, which is what led to them being on Friends. So this is the first appearance of Riverdale's Jughead in the canon of television. Libby is Kaitlin Cullum. She hasn't really done a whole lot. I think she is such a good child actor because most child actors overdo it. She's cute, but she's not too cute; and she's innocent, but not too innocent; and she's just the perfect cross section of everything a child actor should be, and she's really good on this show. I saw a picture of what she looks like today. She looks great. I just don't think she's really acting very much anymore. 

Glen:  Her performance in the episode where her character gets an ulcer because she's stressing over their poverty sticks with me to this day. 

Drew:  That's a really good episode. Yeah. And then—Quentin. Quentin in this episode is played by Jon Paul Steuer, and this is the last season he'll be on the show because Brett Butler flashed him. 

Glen:  Oh, yeah! 

Drew:  Yeah. Allegedly. So, he was released from his contract after this season. If you look up about it, there are a lot of accounts that say that, perhaps under the influence, Brett Butler exposed a breast or more to him, and his mom freaked out and didn't want him to be on the show anymore. 

Glen:  I'm sure he's still got the money. 

Drew:  Uh—he passed away. 

Glen:  Oh, no! 

Drew:  He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on New Year's Day two years ago. He had a hard time with it. He left the show, and whenever he'd try to do acting stuff people just wanted to ask questions about how awful Brett Butler was and what it was like to be on the set, according to him. That's what he said, anyway. 

Glen:  I mean, now I feel like a ghoul. 

Drew:  It's really sad. He did leave acting. He became the front man for a band called Kill City Thrillers. He opened a restaurant in Portland. So he wasn't destitute. He was doing cool stuff but, for whatever reason, he took his own life, which is very, very sad. 

Glen:  We should, in the show notes, post a link to the Suicide Prevention Hotline. 

Drew:  That's a good idea. Please, please, please do not commit suicide. That makes everybody sad. Previous to this, he was—remember that show Day by Day we talked about in the Brady Bunch episode? 

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  He was on that. Like, he was in an episode of that. He also was the first person to play Worf's son on Star Trek: The Next Generation, before the kid from Family Ties took over the role. And he's in that movie Little Giants with Rick Moranis and Ed O'Neill, and he's in that movie with Sam Horrigan, who's the actor who takes over the role of Quentin—and Quentin magically becomes a teenager. It's weird that they aged him up. I don't know. Maybe they just thought that gave more potential storylines to the character if he was fully a teenager now—

Glen:  When you make a character older, that's why it's a different actor. They wanted to age the character up. Had they just replaced him with another kid, it'd be like, "But why is there another kid?" It would lead to questions they didn't want to answer. 

Drew:  I don't know how much people knew about that specific incident at the time. People were talking about Brett Butler's substance abuse problems and also—do you remember how there was a four-way cross over with this, Coach, Drew Carey Show, and something else when they all went to Vegas? Ellen. Ellen was the fourth one. I have heard that they passed out t-shirts to all the crews of other shows that say, "I survived Brett Butler," because she apparently made the filming of all the common scenes that were in all four episodes extremely difficult. 

Glen:  I mean, listen. I'm not a Brett Butler defender or anything—or a defender of anyone in general—but when you want to have a show about a recovering addict, you can't on one hand make money off of their struggles and the storylines that come from it and then be disappointed when sometimes those struggles make the show more difficult. 

Drew:  That's a good point. And to her credit, it seems like this is not an issue she has anymore. She wrote a book, and she's done public speaking about her substance abuse problems and how she got past them. Just maybe starting on your own TV show when you have pre-existing issues doesn't fix them right away. It might just compound things that were already there. 

Glen:  I would like to find out for myself. 

Drew:  When you star as yourself on your own sitcom? 

Glen:  Yeah, yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah. They leave for the trip, and we have the opening credits, and watching them as an adult—

Glen:  So '90s. 

Drew:  So '90s, and also, the place she is driving around is Los Feliz. I can recognize several buildings in the background. 

Glen:  No, Drew. This show takes place in a small town in Missouri. 

Drew:  It's Los Feliz. Definitely Los Feliz. Quentin does not appear in the opening titles. 

Glen:  Hmm. 

Drew:  Everyone else does. The little kid, the daughter, Wade and Nadine all show up. Quentin does not appear at all. That's really weird. I don't know what that's about. So then we get in what is a very distant B-plot for this episode. It's all about Wade running for city council and Nadine being worried that him doing this will mean that naughty photos she had taken of herself—or "artsy nudes," if you will—are going to come to light and embarrass everybody. 

Glen:  I wonder if there was more to that storyline that just got cut because it has obvious parallels to the A-plot of Emmet having a secret gay life that he's worried about being exposed. And as we'll talk about, it's very well done, and maybe they just didn't want to cut that up for something that's just metaphorically working on the same level. 

Drew:  Right. I didn't watch that much further into the season, but in the following episode Wade mentions that he's still running for city council. That's something that doesn't go away, so maybe they just had to set that plotline up. But yeah, it is weird because you're right There are parallels, but they don't really do anything with them and it just seems like this—I don't know. They're distracting to me. 

Glen:  Yeah. I do want to use that scene to mention that the Russel character and the actor who plays him were always—like, he worked on a slightly different level than the rest of the show that ended up making it work so much better. Sometimes his delivery is just so off kilter. 

Drew:  Yeah. He seems like he doesn't belong in that town. I think that's part of his character that he's a weirdo in town. It's Dave Thomas—not that Dave Thomas, the other Dave Thomas, who was also on Arrested Development. He played Mr. F. 

["Mr. F" jingle plays]

Glen:  Either way, I very much enjoyed his performance on this show. 

Drew:  Wade is played by Casey Sander, who is a former pro-baseball player and who also played Xander's dad on Buffy. He played Sven on that one episode of Golden Girls where Rose's nephew comes to visit and falls in love with Blanche—that is him with a mustache—and a ton of other stuff. Nadine is Julie White, who I'm kind of bummed she had to leave the show because someone else was awful, but then I found out that she plays Shia LaBeouf's mom in all the Transformers movies and she's fine. She's not poor for that at all. She is really good in an Annie Potts way. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  She's mostly done stage work. She hasn't done a whole lot of sitcom work, and she's very well-suited for it. 

Glen:  Yeah. She has adorable-woman nervous energy. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. It's like Annie Potts plus Mary Steenburgen. So the next scene we're at is in the bar, and then Grace is back home, and then we have the rabbit—there's actually on three more scenes of this episode, which is maybe why I felt like it went very quickly. Maybe it's just because we're coming off Seinfeld where they had, like, 50 scenes because they do a lot of quick stuff. But yeah. We're in St. Louis, and Rick pulls Grace into a sports bar because he wants to watch a game, and she's like, "Fine. I'll just hang out for a little bit." At what point did you realize that we were in a gay sports bar? 

Glen:  When the man at the bar smiled at—what's her boyfriend's name? Jimmy? 

Drew:  Rick. 

Glen:  When the man at the bar smiled at Rick when he sat down, and with many sitcom scenes, everyone is very close together, but they talk like they are very far apart. If anyone that close to me were just staring at me like that, I would notice. I wouldn't do anything about it, but I would notice. 

Drew:  Smile nervously. That man at the bar is Joseph Latimore, and I don't know how I tried to figure this out, but I know him from when I worked at [censored business name]. I think he did something with us then. I met him then, and I just couldn't place—I couldn't find out online what it is. I was impressed that this is 1995, and they made an effort to make the group of guys in this scene—they're all very good-looking, mostly, but they're multiracial. 

Glen:  Also, the varied ages. 

Drew:  Yes, which was nice, because someone had the presence of mind to do that. So the first man that hits on Grace's boyfriend is a handsome Black guy, and then there's the handsome waiter. 

Glen:  And the waiter is very, very handsome. 

Drew:  Tim Wightman—former pro-football player turned actor who's been on The Drew Carey Show, Mad About You, Baywatch, Renegade. 

Glen:  That's the referee waiter? Okay. 

Drew:  Everyone's pro athletes that became actors after that. He has retired from acting, and he runs the Lazy Bear Ranch in Idaho. It's not the gay kind of bear. I don't think he's gay. 

Glen:  The cute waiter runs through a variety of drinks he's guessing that Rick may want. 

Cute Waiter:  How 'bout you, big guy? Let me guess—scotch? Gin and tonic? Pink poodle? 

Rick:  Huh? Oh, a beer would be fine. 

Grace:  I went through a pink poodle phase. Of course, that's when I was dating longshoremen. And [inaudible 00:28:53]. They are thirsty men, thirsty men. 

Rick:  Shh, shh, shh. Grace, the game. Okay? 

Grace:  Hey, don't hush me!

Cute Waiter:  Here's your beer. I brought you a longneck. 

Rick:  Hey! Well, you got me pegged. 

[audience laughs] 

Glen:  What is a pink poodle, Drew? 

Drew:  I looked it up. I'm so glad you asked. A pink poodle sounds disgusting. It is vanilla vodka, grenadine, and 7up. That would make me want to barf. So he goes, "Scotch, gin and tonic, or a pink poodle?" Those are very different drinks. 

Glen:  Is it like a kiddie cocktail with vanilla vodka added to it? 

Drew:  Yeah, I guess it would be. It'd be like a Shirley Temple with vanilla vodka. 

Glen:  I'd like to try one. 

Drew:  You would only taste pure sweetness. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Yeah, but you'd feel so gross afterwards. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Like, if you feel hangovery after a single beer, I think that will make you feel like death. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  You are become death. You appreciate that. Okay. Everyone thinks Rick is very attractive—and I guess he is? And then the waiter comes back and he's like, "I got you a longneck," and people laugh at that, so I guess that's a—

Glen:  You know, penis. 

Drew:  Penis? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  And then he's like, "You've got me pegged," and everyone laughs at that again—even though "pegging" was not a widely known thing. It's the other kind of pegging. 

Glen:  And then he brings him pretzels. I would love a hot man to bring me pretzels. 

Drew:  I'll keep this in mind for your birthday. 

Glen:  Thank you. Yeah. Grace is the one who picks up on this being a gay bar. I would have thought she would have picked up on it a little bit sooner, but they had to get all those jokes in. 

Grace:  Well, our waiter certainly likes you. 

[audience laughs] 

Rick:  Nah. He doesn't even look gay. 

Grace:  Excuse me, what does a gay guy look like, Rick? 

Rick:  Hey, I don't know. Uh, more lacy. 

Grace:  Lacy? 

Rick:  Yeah. 

Grace:  Like, he's supposed to wear a doily? 

Rick:  He's not gay, okay?  [receives pretzels from Cute Waiter with an "Aw shucks" kind of vibe]

Cute Waiter:  I brought you some pretzels, Tarzan. 

Rick:  Hey, thanks buddy. See? He's not gay. 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  He's done everything but ask you to lambada. 

[audience laughs] 

Drew:  Which is such a weird '90s reference. Do you remember lambada being a thing that was in pop culture very briefly and then not at all? 

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  Do you realize there were two different lambada movies that came out? I did not know this. So I remember seeing the ads for The Forbidden Dance, which was a lambada movie, and that is one of them. It stars Laura Elena Harring from Mulholland Drive, and it came out March 16, 1990, and it was produced by this Israeli producer named Menahem Golan. Okay? Then there was also Lambada, which stars Melora Hardin, who played Jan on The Office, and it was released March 16, 1990. It was released by a different film producer, whose name happens to be Menahem Golan's cousin. 

Glen:  Oh, my god. 

Drew:  So whatever holidays they celebrated together must have been very awkward. They came out the exact same day. This made me think that lambada was something like a sexy thing cool adults did, but I don't know anyone who lambadas now—unless I'm mistaken. 

Glen:  I mean, there's probably a class for that somewhere in this city. 

Drew:  It's probably at that place on Glendale Boulevard. 

Glen:  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Next to the coffee shop. 

Drew:  But it was a thing that just got into pop culture to the point that there was a joke on Perfect Strangers about it. Balky said that he likes lambada because you don't have to wear a shirt and you don't get "sticky pitties." That's what he said [laughs].

Glen:  So this scene is filled with a variety of the usual suspects of gay jokes, down to the bar being called Tight End. 

Drew:  It's a great name for a gay sports bar. 

Glen:  It is, and before it gets to the actual plot of this episode, I kind of thought it was going to be about Grace dealing with her homophobic boyfriend. 

Grace:  Rick, look around here. How does this place compare with other sports bars you go to? 

Rick:  Well—same. Well, maybe a little nicer. 

Grace:  Nicer how? 

Rick:  Grace, I don't know. It's cleaner. People are dressed a little nicer. It's kind of cosmopolitan. I mean, this is St. Louis. 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  It could be San Francisco. I'm telling you, we're in a gay bar, honey. 

Rick:  A gay sports bar? [laughs hysterically]

[audience laughs] 

Glen:  And they actually do have a very lovely conversation about why it's stupid to be homophobic. 

Rick:  I don't believe it, Grace. This is actually a gay sports bar—and I said I loved Moreno—and touched that guy behind me! What does that mean in their world?

Grace:  I think it means you have to drop out of the Republican Party. 

[audience laughs] 

Rick:  Why'd you make me put that mousse in my hair? 

Grace:  Because it made you look lacy. 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  I didn't know you were so homophobic. 

Rick:  Grace, I don't care what people do in the privacy of their own wherevers. I just don't want to be exposed to it, all right? 

Grace:  Because you're homophobic. 

Rick:  No, I'm just uncomfortable, that's all. 

Grace:  Well, let's see. Could it be a bad chair or—you're homophobic?!

Drew:  And she doesn't even say, "You have a problem with gay guys." She's like, "You're homophobic," and he's like, "No. No, I'm not," and she's like, "Yeah, you probably are." Yeah. I'm glad they addressed it that quickly, and it's kind of nice that they were just like, "Shut up. You're homophobic. We're going to move on to something else now," which they do. 

Glen:  Yeah. I forget what her exact phrasing was, but something like—

Grace:  You listen to me. Most of these guys are probably here to watch the game. Some might be looking for love, some have found it. But the point is, they're human beings trying to connect with other human beings, and that should make you happy and not uncomfortable. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Glen:  And it's like, yes! Thank you! And then it moves on. 

Drew:  Then it moves on to a wet Speedo contest. 

Glen:  Yes, which I would have also liked to see. 

Drew:  I would have liked to see it as well. I don't know that I've ever seen one before. I'm sure The Eagle probably has something similar. 

Glen:  I mean, Speedos are meant to be wet. Why wouldn't it just be a wet underwear contest? 

Drew:  That's a good point. Also, I looked it up. How many gay sports bars do we have in Los Angeles? We do have Jim's Sports Bar on Santa Monica—which I think I've been to with you at one point when we went to West Hollywood for some reason. But the listing of gay sports bars in the greater Los Angeles area also lists Hamburger Mary's and The Eagle [laughs]. I really want someone to—

Glen:  Hey, water sports is a sport. 

Drew:  [laughs] Then they're not showing the game in here at all. I like the line where he's like, "Oh, no! I touched that guy. What does that mean?" and she's like, "It means you have to leave the Republican Party." That's a nice little line. And then she sees Emmet walk by and go and sit down to a guy who's been in the background the entire time, and they are holding hands. 

Glen:  And then we cut from them awkwardly acknowledging each other to commercial. 

Drew:  Oh, I like commercials. 

Glen:  Should we take one? 

Drew:  Yeah. We can think about things we might want to buy. 

Glen:  Okay. 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Glen:  I think Thurman dropped a ball under the couch. 

Drew:  Well, it can stay there [inaudible 00:35:25]. 

[music plays]

[Drew and Glen promote reviewing their podcast on iTunes and their Patreon]

Glen:  Are we back? 

Drew:  Oh, we're back. So gay stuff is happening. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Grace:  I don't believe I'm seeing my ex-father-in-law in a gay bar. 

Rick:  Make one hell of a Wayne Jennings song, huh? 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  I'm in shock! I mean—although it does explain why he was so critical of Debbie Allen's choreography at the Oscars. 

[audience laughs] 

Drew:  I looked it up. She really did do the choreography for the Oscars that year. Have we talked about how Debbie Allen is Phylicia Rashad's sister? 

Glen:  No. 

Drew:  They're sisters. We're going to talk about Debbie Allen, actually. She's the star of one of the shows we're going to talk about later this season—In the House. 

Glen:  Lovely. 

Drew:  I do like her, like, "So we got lost, and blah blah blah—" 

Glen:  "Are you as lost as we are?" 

Grace:  Hi, Emmet! 

Emmet:  Grace, what a surprise! Are you as lost as we are? 

Grace:  Oh, more. 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  It's just—we got so turned around on the way to St. Louis. The exit signs are barely marked, and the street signs are like hieroglyphs, are you gay? 

[audience laughs] 

Emmet:  [sighs sadly] Yeah. 

Grace:  Oh! Well. Good. How's things? 

Drew:  [laughs]

Glen:  She provides him ample opportunity to just live the lie with her. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. And he probably would have, too, if not for the fact that his boyfriend is standing right there, and they have a look, and he's like, "I'm not going to deny this right in front of my boyfriend." 

Glen:  Which is very nice of him. Drew, why don't you tell listeners who plays his boyfriend? 

Drew:  His name is Michael Winters. I know him as playing Judge Herbert Spitt on Ally McBeal, but you know him as playing a different role. 

Glen:  Taylor—from Gilmore Girls.

Drew:  Who's Taylor? What does he do? 

Glen:  Well, that's a complicated answer. He is sort of the town busybody—the town of Star's Hollow. He owns a grocery store, I believe, and he's always butting head with Luke, Lorelai's on-again-off-again love interest. Taylor is very much about maintaining the smalltown feel of Star's Hollow and has very specific opinions about what that means. On the show he codes as gay, but I think he might have a wife—but I might be confusing him with Gil Chesterton at the moment, but they are actually quite similar. 

Drew:  It's hard to think of a straight male busybody, though those do exist. But somehow being a busybody just doesn't make sense on a non-gay man. I don't know. Danny is the boyfriend's name. 

Glen:  Does not have a beard, which is why it took me a hot second to recognize him. 

Danny:  Look, you two should talk alone. I'm going to go to the bathroom. 

Grace:  Rick, honey—maybe you should go to the bathroom, too. 

[audience laughs] 

Rick:  No, I don't think so. 

[audience laughs and applauds]

Rick:  I'll just go outside for a minute, honey. 

Drew:  Rick does not want to go to the bathroom because he's homophobic, and then they have a nice little chat between Grace and Emmet. 

Grace:  Does Jean know? 

Emmet:  Oh, lord no. It would kill her. 

Grace:  Are you putting her at risk? Because I don't know if you've read the papers, but this could kill her. 

Emmet:  Oh, no. The only one I've ever been with is Danny, and it's been 15 years, you know—and we've both tested negative. And besides, Jean and I haven't—uh—been intimate for a long, long time. 

Grace:  That explains a lot about Jean [laughs].

Drew:  What'd you think about the exchange about Jean knowing? 

Glen:  I thought it was handled well. I mean, again, this is the mid-90s, so any gay storyline is going to want to at least touch on the HIV/AIDS thing of it all. 

Drew:  And he said they both got tested. 

Glen:  Yeah. He didn't waive it off being like, "Oh, I'm not worried about it." No, he had a very responsible answer. He was like, "We've been together 15 years. He's the only one I'm sleeping with, and Jean and I don't have a sexual relationship anymore." He said it in more old-man speak, but that's the gist of it. Then the moved on—

Drew:  Well, they have this line. He says, "It's complicated." 

Grace:  I don't want to pry, but I got to ask you—what's up with this?!

Emmet:  Well, it's pretty complicated. 

Grace:  No, Emmet. A tax form is complicated. This is up there with Rubik's Cube and "not guilty." 

Glen:  Yeah, it's an O.J. Simpson reference. There are sitcom storylines where a main character finds out someone related to someone is cheating, and it's really about the cheating aspect. And this is about the cheating, but it really is about Emmet living this lie, and Grandma Jean just happens to be a victim of it. It's funny because in the years where I was pitching my movie—very early on it was dismissed. In the movie, Frank is a father with a second family, and I think I may have suggested, "Well, what if Frank's other spouse was a husband?" And it's interesting that sometimes the cheating element of that sort of betrayal falls secondary to the fact that you're hiding that you're gay. 

Drew:  I mean, it excuses it to a certain extent, and also, for plot purposes, it would explain why he never marries the second spouse—because they would not be able to get married. Yeah. I was wondering how quickly this made you think of Being Frank. 

Glen:  Very quickly. 

Drew:  Because they very quickly are like, "Here's the thing. Here's why he did it," and you're like, "Okay. I feel bad for him. He's not being awful. This is a bad thing that he did that is understandable." 

Glen:  Yeah. He's still being awful, but it's understandable. He's cheating on his wife for 15 years. That's an awful, awful thing. But you understand him and why he did it. He grew up in a small town in Missouri—and in hindsight we'd just be like, "Oh. Well, you divorce your wife and live your life and then your kids get to know you as who you are really, and the stress of hiding yourself is not taking a toll on them." Because we should mention that both of his sons are frequently in prison and are not necessarily upstanding gentlemen of society. 

Emmet:  I just thought you got married, you had kids, and that would make these feelings that I have for men go away. 

Grace:  Me, too. 

[audience laughs] 

Emmet:  But it didn't, and then Danny came along, and everything just changed. 

Grace:  Okay. But did you think about getting a divorce? 

Emmet:  No. By that time Jean and I'd been married 25 years. Besides, I love her. 

Grace:  This secrecy has to be eating away at you. I couldn't do it! I ruined The Crying Game for half the people in Missouri. 

[audience laughs] 

Emmet:  What was I supposed to do—tell all those people in our little town that I'm gay? Why, they'd spit on me. And the kids—our kids would be humiliated!

Grace:  You should give your sons more credit than that. You know, boys who've been to jail are pretty understanding about things like that. 

Drew:  But that also sets up a really awkward joke I don't like about this episode. Talking Simpsons is actually what pointed it out, but in this era there are a lot of prison rape jokes as a stand-in when "We want to make a joke about gay stuff, but we're just going to make it about prison because no one will object to it," kind of like the way when people wanted to make a joke about mentally disabled people they would make a joke about Forrest Gump. 

Glen:  Yes. I really liked when Emmet said that he just didn't know what a gay person was—which, you know, true—and then Grace's joke is, "Well, somebody had to hang the streamers at the school dance," and the look on Emmet's face is very well-acted. 

Drew:  He's like, "Oh." 

Glen:  "That was me." 

Drew:  And it ends with Grace saying, "Maybe some nice woman will find Jean." Then we cut back to the house. The trip is over. They're already coming back. And I think my favorite line of the episode probably is actually what Grace says to Libby before she leaves. 

Libby:  Have fun, Mama. I'll miss you. 

Grace:  I'm going to miss you, too, Sugar. [To Jean] Do not tell my children anymore fibs. You talk to them directly. [To Libby] And remember, your grandmama's old and she's got high blood pressure. She loves surprises. 

[audience laughs] 

Drew:  [laughs] That's good. That's like something the Conners would say about Bev. 

Glen:  Yep. 

Drew:  And we find that she's hanging out with Libby, and she's reading bible stories—creationist bible stories—and Libby asks, "Wait. If Adam and Eve are the first people and they had two sons—" they actually had three sons, but whatever. "Where did they find their wives?" And yes, I can remember asking this question at least once, maybe twice in Catholic school, and whatever they told me was not a good enough explanation because I don't remember what the answer is. 

Glen:  And you're also not a believer anymore. 

Drew:  Well, yeah, because it's a very silly story. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. Grandma Jean's response is "Florida. The wives came from Florida." 

Drew:  And that sounds about right. Libby exits and, kind of uncharacteristically, Jean just jumps into "Is there something wrong? I can tell." 

Jean:  Grace, could I talk to you about something personal? I need to talk to somebody I can trust. 

Grace:  Uh—gosh. You know, Jean, I am so busy raising these three kids. When I'm done, I'll be all ears, all right? 

Jean:  Grace—I think Emmet and I are drifting apart. 

Grace:  Okay, then. Well, no more drifting. 

Jean:  Grace, I guess it's that romantic weekend you had with Rick that got me thinking, you know, it's just been ages since Emmet asked me to go anywhere with him. 

Grace:  Oh. You know, relationships need some space, some time apart, every now and then. 

Jean:  No, I don't think so. Emmet hasn't touched me in years. 

Grace:  Uh, Jean. You might want to take cover. My head's about to explode. 

[audience laughs] 

Jean:  Grace, what if Emmet's having an affair? 

Grace:  Well—now—what's going on that makes you think he is? 

Jean:  Well, what am I to think? I mean, these fishing trips keep coming more frequently, and they last longer and longer, and no matter how long he's gone he comes home with exactly two fish. 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  Well, that's not a sign—unless the fish are calling and hanging up [laughs].

Jean:  Grace. Grace, what am I going to do? I've been married 40 years to Emmet, and I know when something's wrong and—[cries]. Something is wrong. Emmet does not love me anymore. 

[audience "awws" in sympathy]

Grace:  Jean, you know what? I can promise you something. You are the only woman Emmet has ever loved. 

Drew:  And it's nicely acted, and all of Grace's responses are nice. Grace does not divulge anything, but Jean thinks that Emmet's having an affair. I do like the line, "I can guarantee you're the only woman that he's ever loved." 

Glen:  But yeah, a difficult position for Grace to be in—to have to comfort this woman who would do no such thing when Grace had her own marital concerns and problems. 

Drew:  Right. Grace, the sinner, is a much better person at heart than the person who reads the bible. 

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  Yeah. Not even subtle about it. 

Glen:  But Emmet returns, and one of the things that Jean had been concerned about, and one of the clues, I guess, was that his fishing trips always resulted in two fish no matter how long the fishing trips were. This fishing trip resulted in four fish. 

Drew:  Four rainbow trout. 

Glen:  Get it? Rainbow trout? 

Drew:  Right. 

Glen:  And so she immediately thinks, "Oh, how silly I'm being." Emmet sees that she's crying and immediately thinks that Grace has divulged the secret. 

Drew:  "Why are you crying? Why is she crying?" Yeah. She's just so happy to have him back, and they head off to fry up those fish right away—which is interesting, considering what happens very, very shortly—and that's the last time we see Emmet. 

Jean:  Don't worry, Grace. I was just being silly. An old lady's paranoia. 

Grace:  Hey. Thanks for watching my children. 

Emmet:  Hurry up, Jean. 

Jean:  No, now this time, you're going to wait for me [giggles girlishly].

Grace:  This isn't really a good time to play hard to get, Jean. 

Drew:  And then, end credits. I felt like that end happened very, very quickly, which is part of the reason we're doing two episodes back-to-back—but then we have the tie-up sequence with Wade and Nadine, which is that he knew about the pictures. The ex-husband actually gave him the pictures as a wedding present. He destroyed the pictures except for one he keeps in his wallet. 

Glen:  All except for one. Yeah. 

Drew:  So there's nothing to worry about. He thought they were sexy. They love each other. 

Glen:  I do want to talk about their décor. There is a flag with 13 stars, and then next to that flag are a couple of Chinese characters hanging on the wall. 

Drew:  They're artsy, that's why. He's a potter. He makes pottery for a living. 

Glen:  Great. 

Drew:  Yeah. Their place looks like a Home Goods store. 

Glen:  Yes. It's very full. 

Drew:  Yeah, with old, cluttery stuff that I guess we thought looked cool back then. But yeah, that's how you code someone as "Missouri artsy," I guess. Is there any other parallelism with Wade and Nadine? Okay. We can just jump to the next one. 

Glen:  I guess it's interesting that the two happy couples we see are presented with—actually, we are presented with three happy couples (two being Jean and Emmet, and Wade and Nadine). Both of those couples had secrets from each other, and one of those couples ends the episode with revealing that secret. 

Drew:  And the other one is very happy to just live the lie. 

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  Which is an option—but it doesn't work out [laughs].

Glen:  No. 

Drew:  Because the very next episode takes place—it aired three weeks later. I don't know how much time is supposed to have passed, but it's Christmas. This is one of the least Christmasy Christmas episodes I've seen on a sitcom, ever. 

Glen:  There is a tree, and they are decorating it, and there's gingerbread men and stockings and all that stuff. 

Drew:  And this first scene is the most time they spend on that subject, for good reason though. So everyone, including Russel's Dad, who's played by Tom Post and who's from Newhart—that's where everyone would know him from. They also have a very terrible relationship. I think they weren't talking for a long time, and then they reunited at some point. They don't like each other. I don't know why they reunited. Anyway. 

Glen:  Well, they're both pharmacists. 

Drew:  Oh. Are they rival pharmacists? 

Glen:  No, I think they work together. 

Drew:  They do work together. You're right. 

Glen:  This show just has a lot of characters that I forgot about. 

Drew:  There are more characters. All of Grace's coworkers don't even show up in these two episodes, so there's eve more that we don't see. Grace also has a sister who's recurring who does not appear in this episode either. 

Glen:  I don't think we need to get too in depth in this episode because there are really only a few things that relate to the previous episode. 

Drew:  The only thing I was going to ask you is that in putting up the decorations, Rick comes out with a ball of tangled-up lights. 

Rick:  Hey, Wade. You want to help me test these lights here? Because see, if they don't work, there's no use trying to unravel this. 

Wade:  Oh-ho, afraid not. Many people are fooled by the false positive when you test them all twisted up like this. It only leads to heartache when you hang them and they go dark. 

Rick:  Wade, you got a lot of free time on your hands, don't you? 

Drew:  Do you have a reach-around for that? 

Glen:  Yes, because Emmet's life is a tangled mess of all the lies, and he dies in this episode. Spoiler alert—he dies, and he died without telling the truth to Grandma Jean, so he never untangled the lights. There's no point in untangling them if the light's just going to go out anyway. So maybe they got to live their happy little lie for the rest of his life, which was not long. 

Drew:  No—about 30 seconds because Jean steps out to take a phone call, and then she—

Glen:  I did not hear a phone ring, by the way. 

Drew:  Quentin comes in and says, "There's a call for you, Grandma." 

Glen:  Oh. Was he on the phone, I guess—call waiting? 

Drew:  Maybe. That was a thing. 

Glen:  I wonder—you said you were going to ask me about the placement of this episode back to back. 

Drew:  Yeah. Why kill him off immediately after he comes out? 

Glen:  I don't know. There's definitely more story to mine there. I would have liked more of that, and to kill a character off just after they come out—it's not insensitive. It's just—

Drew:  No. It's the bury-your-gays trope where gay people exist to be gay and then die. 

Glen:  Yeah. They could have done more. It's sad that they didn't do more. I enjoyed Emmet's character—the sweet, small husband to Grandma Jean's larger-than-life cruelty to Grace. I would have liked to have seen Grace and Emmet have this secret between them a little bit longer to deepen their relationship. 

Drew:  At least an episode. 

Glen:  At least an episode, at least more opportunity for Grace to try and get Emmet to come out—or for Emmet to come out to at least one of his sons (and have that go terribly wrong) and then have this funeral. But the fact that we don't get to see Emmet try to continue to live the lie after the lie has been exposed to someone in his life was a missed opportunity. 

Drew:  I suspect that this was part of a plan to get Jean inside Grace's house because they wanted to make her a regular and have her be more centrally involved in everything—which was a good decision. But they could have just done that with Emmet coming out and—

Glen:  Going to live a life in St. Louis with his boyfriend. 

Drew:  Yeah. They didn't do that. I'll bet there's a reason. I kind of want to try to find someone who was a writer this season and be like, "Can you please explain to me why this happened? I want to know." Maybe I'll do that. 

Glen:  Yeah. And maybe they would also explain why the actor doesn't portray the character before he dies or why it's a closed casket. 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Glen:  Maybe the actor wanted off the show. I don't know. 

Drew:  Maybe. People did want off the show, even though it hadn't reached the rockiest part yet. But yeah, it is very strange that—yeah. We find out he had a heart attack, he's dead, and then Nadine comes bouncing in with gingerbread. 

Grace:  Jean, are you all right? 

Jean:  Emmet had a heart attack. 

Grace:  What? 

Jean:  He's dead. 

Grace:  Oh, no! Oh!

Nadine:  [singing] Joy to the World, the cookies are done! Have fun—geez, who died? 

Drew:  After the opening credits, I want to know, is it a gay joke when Grace is getting ready to go to the funeral and Nadine's staying with Libby—because Libby's sick, I guess? Which is weird, because why doesn't Libby just go to the funeral? But she doesn't go to the funeral. 

Glen:  Because funerals are full of old people, and you don't want to get old people sick. 

Drew:  Oh, I guess that makes sense. And Nadine's like, "Maybe I'll teach her a Christmas carol," and Grace says, "I don't want to hear 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.'" Is that a gay joke? 

Glen:  I guess—the gay is dead? 

Drew:  Yeah.

Glen:  How do you feel about Grace telling Nadine that Emmet's gay? 

Drew:  [laughs] Yeah, she probably shouldn't have done that because that probably was not her place. 

Glen:  No. 

Drew:  She said she was really bad at keeping secrets. She said that she ruined The Crying Game for half of Missouri, so—hello. Hi. Hi, Snookus. 

Glen:  Famous dog actor Thurman Thurmanski in the house. 

Drew:  Buddy, what do you want? I'll just pet him for a little bit. So enter Jimmy. Jimmy is a very interesting character. He's played by Jeff Pearson, who was not ever a professional athlete. He was on 24, Designated Survivor, and he played Meg Manning's dad on Veronica Mars. That's where I recognized him from. He's done mostly not comedy roles, which is interesting because he's playing this character comedically, and he is a source of comedy. He's kind of a Dennis Duffy character for Grace. It seems kind of weird that they would have the guy who was a drunk and a wife beater be loveable and funny, but I think it's actually kind of insidiously great to show, like, no, no—people who beat their wives aren't scary loners that give you bad energy all the time. Like, there's a reason Grace was married to him. 

Glen:  Yeah. And it's also not surprising that they get someone who can pull of drama to play this role because in order to do comedy for a character that awful, you have to bring a level of nuance to it to sell it. Like, yeah, he's sort of a doofus and loveable—

Drew:  He's real dumb. 

Glen:  Yeah, but he also plays that quiet anger pretty well, too. You can see that a couple wrong words would bring out a very different person. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Yeah. The only reason he doesn't start any shit with Grace's boyfriend is that he is considerably larger than him—as everyone seems to note all the time. 

Glen:  He's a very large man. 

Drew:  The kids come down, and they have a conversation with the children about where Grandpa goes when he dies. 

Grace:  If you kids have any questions at all, you can ask—no matter what. Okay? 

Libby:  I have a question. Where did Grandpa go when he died? 

Jimmy:  Grace, do you mind if I take this one? 

Grace:  Shoot. 

Jimmy:  Now, sweetheart. Grandpa's up in heaven. In fact, last night, he probably had himself a big ol' slab of ribs for dinner—didn't even get any sauce on his face because you don't get messy up in heaven. 

Libby:  Is that true, Mama? 

Quentin:  It is if Dad says so. 

Jimmy:  Yes, sir. And then this morning, he probably went out fishing, and when he was finished didn't even have to row the boat to shore. They got a fella' named Michael who does that up there. 

Drew:  Is it weird that this is the second episode in a row where not only is it about a funeral where someone's relative is surprisingly gay, it turns out, but also someone offers a very malinformed conception of how heaven works? 

Glen:  I mean, those kids are going to be fucked up anyway. People lie to kids all the time, and then they learn the truth, and it's fine. That's just sort of what life is. 

Drew:  But I don't think Jimmy was lying. I think he really thought that's what heaven was. It's not any weirder than what Archie Bunker said. It's probably less weird than what Archie Bunker said. 

Glen:  I mean, Grace's version of the afterlife is also not very comforting to a child. "Oh, yeah. Your dead grandfather is everywhere. He's around us at all times." 

Drew:  —watching you go to the bathroom, yeah. The episode ends with Grace being like, "Quentin, go put on your tie. Libby, go to the kitchen for reasons I'll determine later," just to get her out of the room so she can tell Jimmy "We need to be more open-minded with what we teach our kids." 

Glen:  The scene ends, not the episode. You said the episode ends. 

Drew:  The episode ends, yes. So then we're at the funeral—

Glen:  Again, the episode does not end. The scene ends. You keep saying the episode ends. 

Drew:  I don't think that's true. I think you're making that up. 

Glen:  Stop gaslighting me, Drew. 

Drew:  Too bad there's not some sort of record of what I said that we could go back and listen to again.

Glen:  Well, I'm not going to listen to it, so I guess I never will be proven right. 

Drew:  Yeah. You're wrong. The scene ends— 

Glen:  Thank you. 

Drew:  —which I've been saying the entire time, and we're at the funeral, with a closed casket. 

Jean:  You two make such a beautiful pair. You know, if Emmet had had one last wish it would have been to see you two together again. 

Grace:  Wow. What a coincidence. That'd be the last thing I ever wished for, too. 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  That's the best picture of Emmet, Jean. 

Jean:  Isn't it? I know. I know. You know, Grace, Emmet wanted a closed casket. He didn't want strangers looking up his nose. He was funny that way. 

Drew:  It's like, obviously they didn't want to pay the actor, or the actor didn't want to be in the episode to play himself in the coffin. 

Glen:  Yeah. He died of a heart attack. He didn't die of a spiked basketball to the face—I don't know why that's my example of why he would need a closed casket, but there you are. 

Drew:  [laughs] Pancaked by an out-of-control dump truck. 

Glen:  I am horrified by the joke that Russel's dad killed him—

Russel:  He was a good man. 

Russel's Dad:  Yeah, and a good customer. I feel kind of bad I didn't refill his heart medication on time. 

[audience laughs] 

Glen:  g—by not refilling his heart medication in time. 

Drew:  Very dark. 

Glen:  And it's just like a throwaway line. But that's what happened. 

Drew:  So I brought up the frying-the-fish thing because he had a heart attack, and it's weird that he leaves to go eat fried fish and then later Jean talks about "It was probably my cooking that helped kill him." 

Glen:  Well, yeah. 

Drew:  What do you make of the idea that he wanted a closed-casket funeral because he didn't want people looking up his nose because "he was funny that way"?

Glen:  I mean, yeah. Sure. He didn't want people looking at his hidden parts—parts of him he didn't want to show the world. He wanted to control how people saw him—because he was a secret gay. 

Drew:  Yeah, that makes sense. And then Danny shows up. 

Glen:  Yes, and bold move. 

Drew:  It's a bold move. I'm surprised he came back because he has such a tiny role in the previous episode that I'm kind of impressed that we're actually going to see this guy again. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. And I hope that they cast him for the episode knowing that they were going to need someone to pull of this performance because he had to play equal parts grieving lover but also strong enough to then put himself in this situation where he's clearly not going to be welcome and where he's going to be causing grieving people more heart ache—also, in a small Missouri town. 

Drew:  Also a little bit of drama queen in there. 

Glen:  Yeah. He's a little bit of a drama queen. I liked Grace's line. 

Danny:  Hi, Grace. 

Grace:  This is quite a surprise, Danny. 

Danny:  Well, it really shouldn't be, Grace. I was in love with Emmet for 15 years. I had to come say goodbye. I can't believe he's really gone. 

Grace:  Well, I think he's always here with us, and if he were here right now I feel certain he'd try to hide you from his homophobic family. 

[audience laughs] 

Danny:  Well, that's their problem. 

Grace:  Yeah. Hey, you know what would really show them? If you just left. 

Danny:  You know, it's bad enough he had to live a lie. It shouldn't have to go on for all eternity!

Grace:  Look, I know you're hurting, but just calm down. Do it quietly, okay? 

Drew:  And then Jean comes over, and she's like, "Do I know you?" 

Grace:  Uh—Jean, this is Danny. He works for the mortuary. 

Jean:  Oh, good. I brought Emmet's glasses. I want to make sure he sees Jesus. 

Danny:  I, uh—I'm not really with the mortuary. 

Grace:  Well, not since he put too much blush on that dead truck driver's face. 

[audience laughs] 

Danny:  I'm sorry for your loss, Jean. 

Jean:  Thank you. Thank you very much. Uncle Bill, shut that lid!

Glen:  Grace has a lot of bad lies in this scene when she's trying to explain who Danny is. 

Drew:  She said she's really bad at covering up secrets. I like that right as Jean's interacting with Danny she turns around and is like, "Keep that coffin lid closed!" which is a nice little symbolic thing. 

Glen:  The coffin is the closet. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Oh. So then Jimmy meets him as well, and he tries to announce it to Jimmy, but Jimmy is too stupid to understand. 

Grace:  Jimmy, this is Danny, your father's old friend. 

Danny:  Nice to meet you, Jimmy. 

Grace:  Well, Danny. You better get going. Don't you have tickets for Hootie & the Blowfish? 

[audience laughs] 

Danny:  How's that new job in Ohio? 

Jimmy:  Great. Great. How'd you know about that? 

Grace:  Jimmy, you got a job. I saw it on CNN. 

[audience laughs] 

Danny:  Your father talked about you all the time. He was very proud of you. 

Jimmy:  Really? 

Grace:  Really?!

Jimmy:  Well, that's awful good to know. 

Grace:  Boy, I wonder why they keep it so cold in here—oh. 

Jimmy:  So, how did you know him? 

Danny:  I loved your father, Jimmy. 

Jimmy:  Yeah. Everybody loved Daddy. What do you think you're going to miss the most about him? 

Grace:  Uh, I'm going to take—

[laughter]

Drew:  It's a really good line!

Glen:  "—his penis." 

Drew:  Or his butt. And then the service starts, and the reverend or whatever says that he was a—

Reverend:  —devoted husband, father, grandfather, a man who loved his wife and forsook all others. An honest, simple man. A man who loved fishing—

Danny:  No, he didn't love fishing. He loved me!

[audience exclaims]

Danny:  And I loved him! Oh. 

[audience laughs] 

Jimmy:  Yep. Everybody loved Daddy. 

Drew:  Jean doesn't say anything. Jean doesn't react at all. She just kind of sits there blankly. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm, and then they cut to the wake at the house. They sort of pass over the fallout of that outburst, which I was curious because I wanted to see. They don't actually show any of Emmet's family reacting to the news. 

Drew:  They say that Grace had to go up and give a eulogy immediately after that, and that it was a hard act to follow, and that Jean didn't say anything the entire ride home from the cemetery. But yeah, there's a little bit more there, but we're home now. 

Glen:  Again, why is the wake at Grace's house? 

Drew:  I don't think we even ever see Jean and Emmet's house, but yeah. Good question. I mean, Jean can't host the wake. She's grieving. 

Glen:  What? That's not true. It's fine. 

Drew:  Do they? It seems like a lot of work. I don't know. 

Glen:  I mean, someone else can do the work, but usually it isn't—I don't know. So I can't—I don't know. 

Drew:  You can't hold a wake here when I die? When I die under mysterious circumstances? 

Glen:  [laughs] Yeah. That's what I was going to say, but then I was like—well, I don't want to take that role away from whatever husband you eventually marry. 

Drew:  Good thing I've been dropping clues about who I think is going to kill me on all of our episodes this season. You put those clues together, you can figure it out. 

Glen:  Is it me? 

Drew:  Yeah, it's you. So yeah, Jean gets fed Swedish meatballs, and then we have—

Glen:  I'm sorry. I'm still laughing that you're dead [laughter].

Drew:  You're laughing at me being dead? 

Glen:  Yes! [laughs—and keeps laughing]

Drew:  So, follow the clues, guys. It's all in the podcast. 

Glen:  [continues laughing]

Drew:  It's not actually that funny that I'm dead. 

Thurman:  [grumbles]

Drew:  You made Thurman make a noise. 

Glen:  I'm crying—from laughter. 

Drew:  Hmm. Thurman's disturbed by all this noise you're making. He's not familiar with you making that noise so much. Hi, buddy. Hello. I'm not dead, don't worry. Glen hasn't killed me yet. This is when we have that very sweet scene—are you still laughing? 

Glen:  [laughs] Yes!

Drew:  We'll just talk about other things, I guess. 

Glen:  [laughs] No, it's a very sweet scene. 

Drew:  Yeah, and it doesn't end on a laugh at all, and it doesn't need to be there. It's pretty rare on a show like this for the kids to have a scene just among themselves, talking to each other like people. 

Libby:  Did you get to see the body?

Quentin:  No, they had a closed casket. 

Libby:  Why? 

Quentin:  Dad said it's bad luck to look at a dead guy. 

Libby:  Maybe he wasn't in there. 

Quentin:  He was in there. 

Libby:  Maybe he wasn't. Maybe he disappeared. He's a ghost now, and ghosts can go anywhere. 

Quentin:  Man, if I were ghost, I'd go to Disneyland and cut right in front of the line. 

[audience laughs] 

Libby:  Did you cry? 

Quentin:  Me? No way. Let's go find Patrick. 

Libby:  Okay. 

Glen:  She delivered the "Did you cry?" line with both realism and also a sweetness you would only get from acting. 

Drew:  Then we're in the kitchen where Grace is talking with Nadine about how Jean is in denial. 

Nadine:  How is Jean? 

Grace:  You know how they say one of the stages of grief is denial? 

Nadine:  Yes. 

Grace:  She'd deny it. 

Nadine:  Oh. You know what? I think maybe a little denial is not such a bad thing for now. 

Grace:  Well, it is if she's going to use it as a way to let things fester. 

Nadine:  Well, all I'm saying is, not everybody's as strong as you are. Give her a couple days. 

Grace:  Gosh, I didn't even think of that—because in a few days, Emmet won't be dead or gay anymore. 

Drew:  And then there's the knock at the door, and it's Danny, and he's dropping off presents. 

Glen:  Presents! Which is a sweet, sad detail that Emmet bought all these Christmas gifts and kept them at Danny's house. 

Drew:  Kids weren't going to find them there. 

Grace:  Hi. What are you doing here? Jean's inside, Danny. 

Danny:  Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know. I'll be quick. Emmet was hiding something at my house. 

Grace:  Yeah! 

[audience laughs] 

Danny:  No, no. I mean some Christmas presents for Jean and the kids. 

Grace:  Oh, okay. Thanks. Bye!

Danny:  And also, I wanted to apologize for the way I acted at the funeral. I never meant to hurt Jean. Emmet wouldn't have wanted that. 

Grace:  Oh, everybody wants that sometimes [laughs].

[audience laughs] 

Danny:  I know that Emmet was part of your family, but he was my family, too. I guess I just needed to grieve with people who loved him as much as I did. 

Grace:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Who miss him like I do. 

Grace:  Oh, Danny. 

Jean:  Say, Grace, do you have any—what's this lunatic doing out here? 

Grace:  Jean, listen. Danny came by. Emmet left some presents at his house, okay? 

Jean:  Oh, no. He's bought presents and put my Emmet's name on it? I'm going to call the police. 

Grace:  Jean, calm down. That won't be necessary. 

Danny:  I'm sorry. This was a bad idea. I just haven't been thinking straight lately. I'll talk to you later. 

Grace:  Danny—merry Christmas. 

Glen:  Before Jean shows up, is that when Danny says he just needed to grieve with people who loved Emmet as much as he did? 

Drew:  Yeah. That makes sense. 

Glen:  That's a very, very sweet and accurate point to make as to why it's important to include someone's gay lover or partner in these sorts of things. 

Drew:  Maybe don't make the outburst. 

Glen:  How many hookups do you want me to invite to your wake? 

Drew:  All of them. 

Glen:  Okay. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. I want them to give in-depth testimony about what their experience with me was like in life. I think that would be helpful for everyone there. I want open conversations [laughs]. I like how you're just betting on the fact that you're going to outlive me. 

Glen:  I know, against all logic. 

Drew:  I mean, stuff like that works. People who smoke two packs a day sometimes live until they're 90, and you might outlive me along similar lines. 

Glen:  I don't smoke. 

Drew:  I'm not saying you do. I'm saying there are other things—other risk factors at play here. 

Glen:  Like all the cheese I eat. 

Drew:  And the [ghost 01:11:08]. So then Jean comes out. Danny leaves and says, "I'll talk to you later." We actually never see or hear from Danny again. There's not really any reason to. 

Glen:  I mean, I would have watched an episode of their spin-off series—with Jean and Danny living together. 

Drew:  Driving around in a van, solving mysteries? 

Glen:  No. 

Drew:  No? I don't know. Okay. What do you make of the line that Jean gives? 

Jean:  Why did you let that man in your yard? How can you be so cruel to me? 

Grace:  Jean, I'm not being cruel. 

Jean:  If Emmet knew what you were doing, he'd be so ashamed of you. He treated me like a queen. 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  Emmet, she's really making things difficult. 

Drew:  Too easy? 

Glen:  Too easy. I don't know think it was—

Drew:  Grace doesn't say anything. Grace doesn't take that bait, and she says to Emmet's spirit that he's making this very hard. 

Glen:  But yeah, I guess Jean's thought process in all of this is that this crazy person has made up that Emmet was gay and has come to terrorize the family, and Grace has to point out, like, "No. I saw them together in St. Louis. 

Grace:  I don't want to say anything for a few days, you know? I know what you've been through, but you're starting to take this out on the kids. Maybe you need to talk about what's really bothering you. 

Jean:  I don't know what you're talking about!

Grace:  About Danny being at the funeral and saying Emmet was gay. 

Jean:  He was no such thing!

Grace:  Maybe he was, Jean. 

Jean:  Just because that nut Danny says so? 

Grace:  That—and I saw him at a gay bar in St. Louis. 

Jean:  Oh, you're lying. You're trying to hurt me. 

Grace:  No, Jean. 

Jean:  Well, then you're trying to ruin Emmet's reputation. You always hated him!

Grace:  I did not. I loved him, and you know that. You thought something was wrong. You thought Emmet was having an affair. You said so, and you know I'm telling you the truth. 

Jean:  Oh, it couldn't be the truth. If it was, my whole life would be a lie! I thought Emmet loved me. 

Grace:  He did! He loved you so much he didn't tell you because he didn't want to hurt you. 

Jean:  Well, if you knew, then why didn't you tell me? 

Grace:  Because I didn't want to ruin this special moment. 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  Because I didn't want to hurt you either. 

Jean:  Well, you did hurt me—plenty. I'm so mad at you. 

Grace:  You're not mad at me, Jean. You're mad at Emmet. He betrayed you, and then he went and died on you. 

Jean:  I told him to have his blood pressure checked!

Grace:  I know you did. 

Jean:  And everything I fixed, he covered it with salt!

Grace:  I know. I know. 

Jean:  What am I going to do without him, Grace? 

Grace:  Oh, Jean. I'm going to miss him, too. Come here. 

Jean:  [cries]

Grace:  Damn him for dying, huh? 

Glen:  It was real. It does not mean he loved you any less. 

Drew:  Right. 

Glen:  Loved her differently, but not any less. 

Drew:  That whole scene is very well acted, and I like that Peggy Rae can do—I believe her grief. I believe that she's as sad as she is and that she doesn't know what's going to happen to her. And yeah, she's like, "What's going to happen to me?" Well, you're going to move in with Grace, obviously. That's how we're going to fix everything. But she doesn't ever quite get there—doesn't really need to fully get there and probably won't, given the kind of person she is—but at the very least, she gets to express a level of grief that she doesn't the rest of the episode because she's keeping it all bottled up inside because you can't really be in touch with your emotions if you're repressing stuff. 

Glen:  Also, she's not going to process whatever anger she has towards Emmet and his secret life in the same moment that she is also processing her loss. That's why I wish we had gotten at least one more episode with Emmet being gay and out to Grace and whomever else before we dealt with his death. The first episode was sweet and well done because it was just taking that one revelation and fleshing it out, and this one just had to race to fit in a lot. 

Drew:  Right. The first episode is my favorite of the two, my preferred of the two. There's a lot more that needs to happen in this one, and it does feel rushed, and I have more questions about it. But I'm glad we talked about these back-to-back because they do obviously go together. And then there's the final scene. What do you think of Grace using Emmet's homosexuality to fuck with Jimmy? 

Jimmy:  You know, Grace, I was just thinking. If this whole gay thing is hereditary, you know, the way they say it is—and if my daddy liked men, and my mama liked men—

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  Jimmy, you're not gay. 

Jimmy:  Well, how can you be sure? Maybe I'm just in the closet and I don't know it. 

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  Okay. Okay, let's have a little quiz. Do you like boxing? 

Jimmy:  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I like boxing. Nothing better than a good fight. 

Grace:  Okay. You like wrestling? 

Jimmy:  I love wrestling. 

Grace:  Okay. Here's the big one. Say it's Monday night, and you and some buddies go out and watch Monday Night Football, or you take a lady-friend out on a date. 

Jimmy:  Oh, now Grace, you know me better than that. Monday Night Football is a time-honored tradition. I'd have to go out with my buddies. 

Grace:  Um, well, Jimmy—I don't know how to tell you this, but you're gay [laughs].

[audience laughs] 

Jimmy:  No!

Grace:  Well, and believe me, it's as big a shock to me as anybody—but gay as the 1890s. 

Jimmy:  That gay? 

Grace:  Gay!

Jimmy:  Oh, man! This is terrible—just terrible!

[audience laughs] 

Grace:  [cackles] Emmet, I don't know where you are, but god I hope you're smiling. 

Drew:  I love it. 

Glen:  Oh, yeah. It was great. I mean, it wasn't—but it was. 

Drew:  Yeah. Given the O.J. Simpson outcome, clearly we didn't really understand DNA at that point in time. 

Glen:  [sighs ruefully] So yes, Grace leads him to believe that he is probably gay. 

Drew:  I like that she, a straight woman who supports gay people, is weaponizing gay panic to fuck with a homophobe, and that's a version of gay panic we haven't seen at this point. Also, the show is progressive enough that we are so clear how Grace feels about gay people that we're like, "Oh, she can fuck with this. She can use this as a little joke, and it's not going to offend people because we know who she is." A few years before they would have treated—like, "Oh, you can't do that." 

Glen:  There's also maybe a method to the madness. Like Jimmy, at least for a moment, goes through the thought process of "If am gay, what does that mean?" to better—

Drew:  No!

Glen:  Yeah, in the scene he just screams, "No!" and bolts from the chair and goes inside, and there's a childlike sweetness to his anger. But if you just for a second get someone to be in his gay father's shoes to think about "If I'm gay and I'm leading a straight life, how hard would that be for me?" to maybe understand his father a little bit better. 

Drew:  A few episodes later is when they air the episode "Positively Hateful," which is the one where there is a janitor at Libby's school who, it turns out, is—I don't know if they say "HIV positive" or "has AIDS," and Grace tries to go out of her way to defend him, and it turns out he is the worst person she has ever met. He is despicable and rude and only thinks that she's going out of her way to help him because she has some fetish for guys with AIDS. It's crazy in comparison to the Designing Women episode where the person who has AIDS has to be a perfect little angel baby because this guy is the scum of the earth. And then eventually, he's like, "I'm not gay. I'm a drug addict. I use heroin." [laughter] He's so offended that they thought he was gay that he was like, "I'm a drug addict, you idiots. That's why I have AIDS." It's a good indicator of how this show deals with the issue. Actually, I just realized at some point, if we ever want to do a run of 10 episodes that are about how sitcoms dealt with AIDS, that would be really interesting, because I would love to talk about that one but there's nothing really gay about it. And that is another example of "We feel like you know our position on this, so we can have this character who is HIV positive and have him be a monster, and it's okay. We don't need to sugarcoat it for you guys." 

Glen:  I'm just thinking about the potential HIV/AIDS season. 

Drew:  The what? 

Glen:  Our HIV/AIDS season of Gayest Episode Ever. 

Drew:  Mr. Belvedere, Golden Girls—at least those two. 

Glen:  There's a Family Ties, isn't there? 

Drew:  Family Ties. There's a Life Goes On. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff we can do with that. I want to do that. 

Glen:  Maybe that's our bonus? 

Drew:  [laughs] So we now have 14 ideas for the bonus podcast, but we've got to decide on one at some point! Don't worry, there will be another one to decide on when we hit $1,000 and we have to do more. Every $500 we do another bonus podcast. So many bonus podcasts, Glen. Like we said earlier, please give money at patreon.com/gayestepisodeever. Do you have any final thoughts about what we watched today or Grace Under Fire in general? 

Glen:  I don't want to say it's an important shot, but it's a nice counterpoint to a lot of the shows that people feel are mainstream, popular '90s sitcoms. This was a popular sitcom. It's weird that it sort of gets brushed off. Brett Butler was a very talented writer and performer. I really liked that first episode, and it was just a nice—I like whenever TV goes out of its way to portray gay characters in situations that aren't just, like, a metropolitan 20- or 30-something. I wanted to see more from Emmet and his character. 

Drew:  I think the closest we'll get to anything like this is—there's a King of the Hill I want to do later on in this run of episodes we're doing that's kind of in the ballpark. 

Glen:  The gay rodeo? 

Drew:  Yeah. But yeah, it's a character you don't see very often. You see a lot of more late-in-life lesbian characters also than you see late-in-life gay guys. I was happy. I hadn't really watched that much Grace Under Fire since it went off the air. Someone told me, like, "The jokes don't hold up," but actually, I thought the writing on these two episodes was pretty solid, and the performances were also pretty solid. Grace Under Fire is streaming on Amazon Prime if you ever want to take a little blast from the past. 

Glen:  Although I will say that they use the wrong Quentin for the art for Season 3. 

Drew:  Yeah, I noticed that. I didn't want to do a Google image search for "Grace Under Fire Season 4 cast" to replace it. Glen, if people have Grace Under Fire remembrances that they want to share with you, what's the Twitter address that they should send them to? 

Glen:  @IWriteWrongs—that is I-W-R-I-T-E-Wrongs, or they can tag me in Grace Under Fire cast photos on Instagram @BrosQuartz—B-R-O-S-Quartz. Lately, a lot of people have been tagging me on Instagram in their selling of sex photos. 

Drew:  Yeah, I've noticed that, too. And it's all women, too. 

Glen:  No, mine are all men. 

Drew:  Oh. Well, the algorithm works for you. It does not work for me. I have a bunch of—I'm going to say Eastern-European-looking ladies who are trying to tag me—

Glen:  Are they all holding a sign in front of a mirror? 

Drew:  No, it's erotic photos, and they've tagged as many people as you can tag on a single photo. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah. So, work on your spam better, porn bot. I'm @DrewGMackie—M-A-C-K-I-E—on Twitter and @KidIcarus222 on Instagram. 

Glen:  And when you pass, what would you like the handle for your condolences page to be? 

Drew:  Is it a condolence page for Instagram, or for Twitter, or—

Glen:  Twitter. I want people to tweet their well wishes to your spirit. 

Drew:  @DrewMackieDeadDeadDeadDeadDeadDead. Can it be that? 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Yeah. Okay—DeadDeadDeadDeadDeadDeadDeadDead. That many times, please. 

Glen:  Okay. Let's wrap up because there's a helicopter coming. 

Drew:  You can listen to all previous episodes of Gayest Episode Ever at gayestepisodeever.com. I already said about our Patreon. Please give us a rate and review. Our logo was designed by Rob Wilson. See his stuff online at robwilsonwork.com. This is a TableCakes podcast. Table Cakes is a Los Angeles based podcast network, and you can learn all about the other shows we have on this network by going to tablecakes.com. Glen, in the closing moments of last week's episode, you asked me to reveal a secret. 

Glen:  About celebrities you've slept with? 

Drew:  Yes. So I want to turn it back on you. I want you to tell us, as near as you can remember, who's the first TV character you ever had a crush on? 

Glen:  I definitely had Joey Lawrence in Married... with Children crushes. 

Drew:  Joey Lawrence—?

Glen:  Not Joey Lawrence. I meant, I definitely had Matt LeBlanc on Married... with Children. I think that was my first dream where a man showed up shirtless and sweaty. 

Drew:  Oh, really? He's Kelly's boyfriend? 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. He's a boxer. 

Drew:  Oh. He's a boxer, but he's really stupid, too, right? 

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  That makes sense. Okay. That's a pretty good one. Is it weird if I try to think of the first character I ever had a crush on on TV and it's Margaux from Punky Brewster? 

Glen:  It's just weird because I didn't ask. 

Drew:  Oh! Okay, we're not—it's not going to be reciprocal. Okay. 

Glen:  [stifles laughter]

Drew:  Well, I thought maybe we could get people to want to stay past all of our end-of-episode bullshit by revealing some sort of secret, but maybe we'll just wait for another instance for you to be a weird little punk to me for no reason. 

Glen:  Also, Ren on The Pirates of Dark Water. 

Drew:  What? I'm sorry? 

Glen:  Nothing!

Drew:  —okay. Well on that note, on The Pirates of Dark Water note, I think we're done with this episode. We'll be back next week—

Glen:  Maybe. 

Drew:  —for a TV show that's not going to be Pirates of Dark Water. 

Glen:  Or will it be? 

Drew:  It probably won't be. Episode over! We're done. 

Glen:  Bye forever [laughs].

["Baby I'm Burnin' (Disco Mix)" performed by Dolly Parton plays]

Katharine:  A TableCakes production.