“The Goode Family” Recap: Helen’s Back

By Stacey Harrison

goode-family_helens-backFirst off, I’m not a fan of the new Friday night time slot. While ABC paid lip service to the idea that it doesn’t mean the show is on its way out — that oh no, they’re in the midst of packaging this and other low-rated shows like Surviving Suburbia into a new TGIF bloc — the writing seems to be on the wall. Which is a shame, because The Goode Family seems to be hitting its stride.

All the big targets the show tries to hit — white guilt, snobbery among the do-gooders and political correctness overtaking common sense — are nailed dead center in the latest episode, which is a perfect illustration of that old saying about where a road paved with good intentions leads you.

Helen is a nervous Nellie trying to get the house ready for a visit from an organic gardening club tour. It’s the first time her house has had the chance to shine like this, and becoming part of the club means everything to her. It would finally show that Margo who really cares about the Earth more, right? To spice up the living room’s diversity appeal, Helen fishes out an old picture of the Burmese child she’s been sponsoring for 30 years and looks for just the right place to display it. But while she’s climbing some furniture to put it on high, she slips and lands hard on the floor, throwing out her back.

She’s going to be laid up for a while, so she persuades Gerald to overlook the family’s tight budget — Gerald’s even going to be making their own toothpaste (Yay! Carrot breath.) — to hire some gardeners. But Gerald is insistent that he not exploit poor Latino workers to do his bidding, lest he feel like a “conquistador.” So he unironically states that he has a whites-only hiring policy. To his great relief, he’s able to find a totally whitebread organic gardening company … whose van proceeds to drop a trio of apparently immigrant workers off on his doorstep. Gerald tries to explain that he won’t allow them to work for him because he only wants whites there, apparently hears how bad that sounds, and comes up with a solution: He will pay them directly. But they need more work, so he starts sharing them with his friends and neighbors, collecting the money and handing it over, minus a buck or two for gas.

So the garden is taken care of, but the inside of the house is still in rough shape. Enter that long-suffering Burmese child, Mahkinkin, who has escaped Myanmar and shown up on the Goodes’ doorstep. She immediately corrects Helen’s back, then insists on doing an ungodly amount of housework … and sleeping in the tool shed. Who are we to impose our Western values of comfort on her? Helen and Gerald reason. Yeah, offering her a bed would be “cultural imperialism.”

The kids are dealing with more mundane situations, like running out of money to buy Gerald’s flax seed for his waffles. They get the bright idea to start “trading up,” bartering one item for another until they get the flax. It quickly starts working, and while Ubuntu is all “just the flax, ma’am,” Bliss has bigger ideas. She has them oh-so-close to getting a classic European scooter that would ensure she never had to ride the bus again with the Goth kids and theater dorks.

Helen is eager to show off her Burmese refugee to Margo, who is upset because she doesn’t have one yet, despite being on a list. But Margo’s eyes brighten when she overhears a conversation between Helen and Mahkinkin that makes their situation sound a lot like slavery.

It all comes to a head as Gerald and Helen are sitting on their porch, sipping cucumber juice while their cheap immigrant labor works their garden, cleans their house and sleeps in tool sheds. They realize they are essentially slave owners, and quickly seek to make amends. But the gardening club group is at their door! They hold things together for a while, but it’s not long before the situation looks as bad as they possibly can, especially to the head of the group, who appears to be a Latino man. But in one of the show’s more brilliant creative strokes, things quickly turn around. Bliss hands off her beloved scooter to Mahkinkin, saying the refugee was simply bartering her labor for a chance at motorized transportation, and the heretofore Latino garden workers actually turn out to be an Afghan and two Romanians. The Goodes and the gardening club have to deal with the uncomfortable truth that they just assumed they were illegal immigrants from Mexico. When Gerald asks why they let him continue with the facade, the Afghan man says, “People just seem comfortable with it.”

And that, my friends, is a good way of conveying in a matter of minutes a message that so-called important, Oscar-baiting movies take more than two hours to get across. This is the genius of Mike Judge. It might be too late to save The Goode Family, but let’s enjoy it while we have it. And when it becomes a cult classic, we can say we knew it when.

Photo: © 2009 American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.

1 Comment

  1. But Oscar-baiting movies make their point in one two-hour sitting — they don’t insist on returning week after week to hammer home the same points. I’m not saying TGF should be cancelled; it SHOULD be given time to develop its characters and see where the ideas can go. But after seeing the premiere, I was really unsure of how far they could chase their quarry, and apparently I wasn’t the only one.

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