Fox’s Thursday Comedies Need to Quit Hinting Around and Actually Show Us A Threesome
Around this time last year, America caught a raging case of Challengers fever. The film, from Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, portrays a trio of aspiring pro tennis players — pals Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist) and Tashi (Zendaya) — jumping around in time from their frisky late teens to their resigned thirties with several stops in between. To reduce a gripping thriller to a gross oversimplification: everyone is in love with everyone else, and the sexy possibilities made it a meme overnight. What those memes acknowledged was what the movie boldly states: any love triangle is less interesting than three hot characters just getting it on together.
Since Fox’s Thursday night comedies premiered their latest seasons back in January — Season Three for Animal Control, and Season One for Going Dutch — both have seemed like they learned the lessons of Challengers. But did they really? These shows’ characters act like they’re into threesomes, but where’s the hard (pun intended) evidence?
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Animal Control characters’ sex lives have been on the table (as it were) since the first season. Not only do we learn right away that Officer Victoria (Grace Palmer) is bisexual; we also find out she is competing against her fellow officer Frank (Joel McHale) for the affections of Dr. Summers (Alvina August), the department’s vet. Dr. Summers didn’t stick around, but no matter, it seems Frank and Victoria generally have similar taste in women, as we learn with the Season Three introduction of Fiona (Lucy Punch). A wealthy and accomplished beauty magnate, Fiona becomes a fixture at the department thanks to the efforts of director Emily (Vella Lovell), who partners with Fiona on a campaign to raise funds for new kennels. Frank may be the first member of the department to get down with Fiona — after signing an NDA, of course — and receive gifts like fancy headphones, but he’s not the last.
Once Fiona determines that Frank and Victoria found out they have her in common and are using a fundraising event at her house to compete for her (Victoria appearing pantsless; Frank cradling a baby kangaroo in his arms), she asks them both to stay afterward. Frank suspects Fiona is going to propose a threesome, and tries to talk himself out of his nerves: “No biggie. It’s just like doing extra reps. Naked. With a co-worker.” Victoria, on the other hand, seems unfazed, purring to Frank, “See you on the ice, kid.” At the end of the night, Fiona does say she thinks she detected a vibe between Victoria and Frank, but when she kisses each of them and then cues them to kiss each other, they freeze — right before Emily returns for a mange poster and kills the horny mood. Before long, Fiona is sending her lawyer to break up with both her flings on her behalf, so we’ll never know what could have transpired among them. DAMMIT EMILY, now we all hope you get mange!!!
Things are a little dicier on Animal Control’s time-slot neighbor, Going Dutch. Since it’s set at Stroopsdorf, a U.S. army service base in The Netherlands and revolves around enlisted troops, the only romance that isn’t officially prohibited is between officers of the same rank. This is a problem for Maj. Abraham Shah (Danny Pudi), who’s going through a divorce and might benefit from cutting loose a little. Then Gen. Gerald Davidson (Joe Morton) decides to receive his second star in a ceremony at Stroopsdorf, extending his psychic abuse of Col. Patrick Quinn (Denis Leary) by forcing him to witness the General’s success. Challenging though it will be for Shah’s boss, the Colonel, it’s great news for Shah, since it means visits by lots of officers he doesn’t know — and soon Pvt. Elias Papadakis (Hal Cumpston) has identified “an XO who wants to sex-o.”
Major Clark (Gemma Knight Jones) knows Shah by reputation, and after the briefest of small talk, she suggests they go somewhere private. But they’ve barely started making out before Shah hears a voice behind her: O’Connor (Jonny Everett) is tied to the desk chair and getting ready to watch them have sex. When Shah sputters that Clark is with him, she says that, actually, she arranged this whole scene. She and O’Connor are married; O’Connor says they like to keep things “spicy.” Shah says there has to be something between “vanilla sex and a Devil’s threeway,” but O’Connor says all he does is watch — then generously offers to let them blindfold him, though admits that could be even hotter. After Shah has exited the scene, he asks Papadakis’ accomplice MSgt. Dana Conway, “Is two-person sex over?”
“I don’t know,” she shoots back. “I’ve never done it.”
Given this claim, expectations are high when, a few episodes later, Papadakis and Conway both admit they have a crush on Maud (Anaïs van der Werff), a Dutch civilian who works in the laundry. But even though Conway just let us all know she’s only into group sex, things proceed as they did with Fiona’s suitors on Animal Control, touching off a competition between the series regulars: Conway contrives a reason for Maud to lean in close and smell her perfume, while Papadakis bonds with Maud over a shared love of archery, claiming, “I need help notching my cock feather.” After Maud has left, Conway is shocked that Papadakis has seemingly bested her at the art of seduction, but he hisses that Conway has it easy with her good looks and charisma: “But I do the work. And I am not above an Instagram stalk.”
When Papadakis later wanders into Conway’s lair of contraband and sees her setting up a romantic tablescape, he accuses her of “stealing Maud” with her “sexy cheese dates.” But Conway has prepared this for Papadakis and Maud by way of apology — and also because her Instagram stalk of Maud revealed that she’s a flat earther, a dealbreaker for Conway. This is pretty close-minded of someone who’s represented herself as a libertine: How important is a partner’s susceptibility to scientific misinformation in a likely one-night stand? And why shouldn’t Conway and Papadakis both fool around with Maud if “two-person sex” is over? Then they could both run up and down the halls afterward, yelling to all their colleagues that they “touched boobs,” instead of that falling solely to Papadakis!
In last night’s Season Three finale of Animal Control, a briefly pleasant moment with his brother Patrick (Thomas Lennon) helps Frank realize that he and Victoria may be more than co-workers and “technically friends” who “made out with a billionaire together” — Victoria did, after all, just gift him an extraordinarily fancy panini press. But when Frank heads over to her place to see what might happen, he sees through the window that she isn’t alone: she’s kissing Parker (Josh Segarra), flip house phrogger-turned-roommate to Frank’s partner Shred (Michael Rowland). “Well, let that be a lesson to you, Frank,” he tells himself. “Never try.”
WRONG: the lesson is that you go up there and try to get in on what they’ve got going!
I was told Fox was going to turn into a hardcore sex channel; turns out it’s run by a bunch of prudes.
