NBC brought “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” back for Season 2 on Monday, November 2nd. The premiere is called “We Keep the Kisses” and it changes almost nothing, which is the right call. Reggie Dinkins (Tracy Morgan) still wants the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Arthur Tobin (Daniel Radcliffe) still has a camera on him. This time there is a secret romance in the house, a new hire in the office and a ferret in the wrong place. The jokes arrive faster than the plot does, and the plot is better than it needs to be.
Season 1 gave Reggie four Hall of Fame votes, the most of his career. It ended with a last-minute reveal about his son. Robert Carlock and Sam Means created the show with Tina Fey as an executive producer. Carlock and Means also wrote this premiere. The series airs Mondays at 8:30 p.m. ET on NBC right after “St. Denis Medical”, with episodes on Peacock the next day. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” Seasons 1 and 2, including the ending of “We Keep the Kisses.”
The jokes arrive faster than the plot does, and the plot is better than it needs to be.”
Carmelo (Jalyn Hall) was secretly dating Delilah Basmati (Arica Himmel), the daughter of Reggie’s old rival Jerry Basmati (Craig Robinson). Arthur frames the feud the way a documentary filmmaker would. He narrates the Basmatis and the Dinkinses as football’s Montagues and Capulets and then updates the comparison: “Autobots and Decepticons for modern audiences.” Carmelo is the Romeo, or the Bumblebee, and Delilah is the Juliet, or the Starscream. Reggie has always counted on his family through injuries and scandal, Arthur adds, and even through an ill-advised Kwanzaa album. A cutaway to that album follows at once, in the style “30 Rock” built its name on, and then the show moves on. That speed is the whole method.
Carmelo wants Arthur quiet. He tries an English breakfast as a bribe and then an attempt at blackmail. Arthur refuses to expose anyone. He insists he is only observing and he is plainly hoping something blows up. Brina (Precious Way) does the real work. She tries to be the cool stepmom until she finds an unfamiliar hair on Carmelo’s clothes, and then she turns detective and tracks Delilah down through social media. Arthur is so excited to see the story finally move that he throws himself into the frame, and the A.V. Club catches him asking “Quick talking head?” as he picks himself up off the floor.
ScreenRant says Brina orders Carmelo to end the relationship. When she learns that Arthur knew all along, the A.V. Club reports, she reaches for “Jail! No, space jail!” and then explains the physics of space jail at length. Carmelo and Delilah answer with a staged breakup, and Arthur sees through it and decides to stay out of the mess this time. That is the smartest thing he does all episode. The fallout is still coming, and the premiere knows it.
Reggie’s half of the hour starts with his comeback. His “Saturday Night Live” turn is now streaming on Peacock and Monica (Erika Alexander) wants to cash in, but the media world has moved past her. IndieWire points to a gag where Monica admits she booked Reggie on the wrong show and Julio Torres turns up as himself to ask Reggie about “the color clear”. Her fix is an assistant. The waiting room fills with applicants who include Spirit Airlines pilots and vaccinated country singers. The job goes to Max (Jeremy Culhane), a young marketer who talks fluent internet. Culhane is a “Saturday Night Live” cast member, and NBC lists this as his NBC comedy debut.
Max books Reggie on “Sunday Night Football”, where Mike Tirico plays himself and interviews him. It is the comeback moment Reggie wanted, and it goes wrong because Slinky the ferret is hiding in Reggie’s shirt and starts to explore. Morgan plays the next few minutes as a man trying to keep his dignity with a ferret in his clothes, and the A.V. Club says watching him cope is “still what fans have come for.” It is a classic Morgan setup, but the episode has sharper ones.
Then comes the reveal. Monica and Reggie walk in on Max in a red latex suit, filming cake-sitting videos as a side hustle. Max does not apologize and turns on the two of them. “I am in so much debt for an education that is useless now!” he shouts, and he blames “you Boomers” for the lie his generation was sold. Reggie and Monica object that they are Gen X. The rant ends on measles with “MEASLES ARE BACK! Thank you for that!” The writers enjoyed it. “We had fun writing that”, Means told NBC Insider.
The measles joke pays off at the end, and it is the cleverest beat of the hour. Monica’s answer to the Max mess is to get “The More You Know” to rerun Reggie’s old public service announcement, in which he tells parents to vaccinate their kids against measles. The A.V. Club quotes the line as “Vaccinate your kids against measles. You’d have to have a worm in your brain not to do it.” That review also opens on the sentence that sums up the plan: “If the measles can make a comeback, so can Reggie Dinkins.” It is a small win and the show knows it. Reggie wanted a parade and he got a rerun, which is the engine of this series in one gag.
The episode ends on its real subject. Reggie and Arthur sit down after another round of failed plans, and Reggie brings up Sisyphus. Getting close to a goal and having to start over is frustrating, the two agree, and Reggie adds that the rock would have been easier to push with someone to talk to. It is a quiet scene and it works because both men have lost a career. Radcliffe told Studio 512 that Morgan has “this very sweet, vulnerable, incredibly generous side to him”, and this scene is where the show spends it.
The reviews run warm. IndieWire’s headline calls the series “the Funniest Series of the Year”, Collider calls Season 2 a perfect replacement for “30 Rock”, and the A.V. Club’s headline says “thankfully nothing has changed”. ScreenRant is cooler: its reviewer prefers Carmelo’s story to Reggie’s publicity plots and finds Max’s meltdown stretched. The hour has a lopsided shape since Max is the loud part and the Carmelo secret is the part that can carry a season. Still, a premiere that makes a ferret, a latex suit and a measles PSA feel like one idea is doing its job.
Episode 2, “The Spaghetti Loop”, follows next Monday. The season keeps adding guests. Boris Kodjoe plays Monica’s new love interest, Leslie “LP” Pervis. André De Shields plays Arthur’s mentor, a filmmaker named Vernon Bellow. Jane Krakowski plays an interior decorator named Angela Broyer, and Jason Mantzoukas plays a music producer who works with Brina. Radcliffe has promised a Thanksgiving episode with “not one, but two Tony-winning Broadway legends and a gospel star.” Carlock says the show goes after the boomers “with equal virulence” later in the season, so Max’s rant is only half of the argument. The premiere sets a high bar and the next episodes have to clear it with the same family and a bigger guest list.
What Do You Think? Can Carmelo and Delilah’s staged breakup survive another week of Brina’s detective work? Does Max deserve a permanent desk after that rant? Did the ferret steal the episode, or did Reggie and Arthur and their rock?
See you on the next binge!
