By Geno McGahee
I have always liked Vic Tayback. When I was a kid, I watched him on ALICE, but I always thought it was called “MEL’S DINER.” He played Mel and you can’t tell me that he wasn’t banging the three waitresses that worked for him. I hated Flo. That entire “kiss my grits” got old after about the hundredth time, but to Mel, it was all good I bet. Perhaps he said: “Forget the grits, I want the tits.” Perhaps not. Whatever the case, my point is that I like Vic Tayback.
Alan (Tayback) works for Brad (Jon Jacobs) and is in sales…I think. He may be in insurance or real estate or sex toy safety, but whatever the case is, Alan has a demon. He was a drunk and he is still fighting the battle day by day. Brad walks up to him and offers him a drink, but he declines. Immediately, some young boy named “Jerry” (Chris Hebert) walks in and starts calling Alan dad. Alan is confused because he doesn’t have a son named Jerry and has no clue who he is.
When Alan gets home, his wife is furious at him and Jerry is over for dinner. Sharon (Kelly Jean Peters), Alan’s wife, insists they have a son and starts implying that her hubby has been drinking again. Can you blame him? All those hours at the sex toy safety place and running a diner? You need to relax a little.
As time goes on, Alan starts to fall back into his old ways and begins to look worse for wear. His suit is all wrinkled and he needs a shave, and he is totally fed up with that little shit pretending to be his son. His whiney wife keeps nagging him. It’s no wonder he drinks! On top of her busting his balls, she continually brings up his past problems. How will that help the guy? “Remember what happened? Remember!” Poor Alan. He deserved a better wife than that. Zero support!
While at work, Alan gets a call and his wife is leaving and taking their children. He isn’t very happy about that and storms home, tearing up Jerry’s room and screaming “Jerry doesn’t exist” over and over again, as he tosses shit around. He collapses on the bed and realizes that he has lost everything and reverts back to the drunk he was before all the nagging and the guilt trip shit.
SPOILERS
It turns out that Jerry, the 9-year-old, was hired by the company that Alan works for, which was apparently hired by his wife. The idea, I guess, was to take a recovering alcoholic, drive him mad, force him to drink again, and hopefully he will kill himself. Alan isn’t the only guy they do it to. At the end, they got some other poor guy that says he’s “on the wagon” as Brad offers him a drink. Fucking Brad. He needs a good kick in the balls for playing this game.
THE NEW MAN is a good episode, but a strange one. What parents would allow their 9-year-old son to move into a strange man’s house and do this? I guess they could just get the names of the parents of the kids that stayed at Neverland Ranch, but Alan didn’t even have a monkey named “Bubbles”. It’s just not realistic. If the alcoholic is violent, the kid’s ass would be grass and if Alan wanted to, he could have taken that little shit and thrown him down the stairs. I can only assume that the kid is related to Brad, since he set this up. Whatever the case, it didn’t seem realistic.
I recommend THE NEW MAN. It’s a great performance by Vic Tayback and there is enough mystery around it to make it interesting.
Rating: 7/10