Raising Hope: Season 2 Premiere

I must admit, I didn’t see Raising Hope last season. Despite the hype and the feedback from friends, I hadn’t given it a shot. Even though I found the commercials entertaining (in part because I too had a small child around Hope’s age and I too was dealing with “first-time parents” problems), I never got around to watching it. But this summer I was lucky to catch some episodes at random, and I was immediately hooked.

There was a certain something that made the show stand out to me. Was it the hilarious lines? Was it the unconventional situations in which the characters found themselves? Was it Maw Maw (Cloris Leachman) and her moments of lucidity? When I thought of it this way, Raising Hope didn’t seem any different from, say, Parks and Rec, another fan favorite of mine.

But then I heard a memorable line in the Season 2 Premiere. When Jimmy Chance (Lucas Neff) decides, in a drunken stupor, that his musical talents are gone forever, he utters to his family: “We’re not great at things. We’re normal at things.” All of a sudden, things clicked for me. Because this phrase seems to be the key to what makes Raising Hope great. The plot walks a fine yet exceptional line between normal and abnormal, and does soars because of it.

The season premiere is a good example of that fine line. In fact, what caught my attention about this episode was that move from a seemingly normal situation into a plot that takes a loco left turn. The show starts with Hope sitting along side her father Jimmy, the two of them watching home videos of when Jimmy was 13 years old. It’s all the usual home video flair, until Jimmy catches sight of himself playing the piano. He doesn’t seem to remember any of this, and when he hears himself in the video, he’s dumbstruck at what he considers a tour de force performance. His parents Virginia (Virginia Plimpton) and Burt (Garret Hillahunt) cave in and tell him the truth: he was an incredibly talented singer and musician… once upon a very long time.

The plot starts out in an ordinary way (Daddy and daughter watching home videos), but quickly unravels into wackiness and hyperbole. Once Jimmy stumbles upon the clip of him playing the piano with unearthly aptitude, singing like a child Bieber prodigy (the references to Justin Bieber were anything but subtle), the story gets unnaturally quirky: there’s a crow involved, a puppet that hits Jimmy on the head, and even a drunken piano recital.

On the other hand, the plot isn’t too outlandish; the fundamental root stems out of a boy trying to impress a girl he likes. When Jimmy notices how Sabrina (Shannon Woodward) looks at the Jimmy in the home videos, he decides he needs to take his teenage amnesia seriously and try to reverse it. It’s believable situations such as these that are rooted with real plausibility and combined with unexpected actions that truly make the show so memorable.

And this is where Raising Hope excels: it’s a story about just another “normal” family. Except the idea of what counts as normal gets blurred, and we laugh along not simply because the conventional family gets fuzzy, but instead, we laugh because we can relate to that fogginess within our own “normal” dysfunctional families too.

That is why that line drunkenly uttered by Jimmy in his backyard sums up what makes Raising Hope work: it’s a fine line between normal and abnormal. And if we take an honest look at ourselves in the mirror, I think we will agree, we all have a little bit of both.