The Best Home Movies Episodes - The A.V. Club

“Director’s Cut” (season one, episode six)

The first episode to debut on Adult Swim is also the first episode to get Home Movies right, a clash of artistic temperaments pitting Brendon’s concept for a film about two famed Frenchman who never met in real life—Louis Braille and Louis Pasteur in Louis, Louis—against Dwayne’s rock opera that tells the story of Franz Kafka. Jason and Melissa want to do the movie with the shredding and the metamorphosis; Brendon is incensed that his friends would want to follow anyone else’s creative vision, just as McGuirk is incensed about losing control of the soccer team to a younger, more charismatic assistant coach. It’s a great introduction to the main characters as individuals with their own feelings and priorities, with Benjamin going on a fantastic, mournful jag after Brendon leads Jason to believe that Dwayne has died. And the Queen harmonies, power-pop melodies, and semi-informational lyrics of the Kafka rock opera (“I’m a lonely German / A lonely German from Prague / I wonder what I’ll write about / I think I’ll write about bugs”) set a high bar for the music that follows. Plus, if you start here, Paula’s new voice is the only Paula voice you’ll ever know.

“Mortgages And Marbles” (season one, episode 11)

Brendon expands into message pictures after a traumatic visit to the emergency room with his little baby sister inspires him to make sure that no child ever sticks a marble up their nose again. Unfortunately, the rule-breaking puppet he creates for the project, Spiky McMarbles, makes the wrong impression on his audience, leading to an all-timer Home Movies punchline: “So tell me: At what point did you get the urge to stick marbles into your nose?” “When Spiky told me not to.” (Admittedly, the refrain to Dwayne’s theme song doesn’t help matters.) “Mortgages And Marbles” is also notable for a storyline in which McGuirk makes a rash decision and tests the patience of his fellow adults, crashing with Melissa and Erik after abruptly moving out of his apartment and taking Erik up on the offer to find a new place. Maybe Brendon would’ve had better luck with a PSA about lining up a new home before you leave your old one.

“Hiatus” (season two, episode three)

Given the way Home Movies was recorded, the show would never fully shed its digressive nature (nor would you want it to). Before the show moves into a more serialized arc involving Brendon reconnecting with his father and his father’s new fiancé, the kids take a break from filmmaking, after a playback session reveals that their latest crime drama has unraveled into Brendon and Jason’s characters inexplicably (and hilariously) opting to “fight with jazz.” While introducing another of the season’s major arcs—Brendon’s tongue-tied crush on Scäb’s new choreographer, Cynthia (Jen Kirkman)—“Hiatus” opens itself up to some minor characters who’d play an increased role as the show progressed: chipper playground dandies Walter and Perry and faculty pushover Mr. Lynch. Jason’s hiatus friendship with Walter and Perry is destined to be short-lived, but Lynch gives McGuirk a lasting foil—particularly valuable with Katz’s reduced presence in later seasons. Here, their Oscar-and-Felix routine takes them on a Mexican vacation, where Lynch is, disastrously, the only one who speaks the language.

“The Party” (season two, episode five)

Here’s one that really makes use of the Home Movies house style: an episode centered on a birthday party for Fenton Mulley, with plenty of big group scenes and spotlight moments for the supporting cast. The type of role that couldn’t have been easy on Sam Seder’s vocal cords (see also: Hugo, his wrathful Bob’s Burgers food inspector), Fenton is a huge brat with a doting mother, so naturally his birthday party is hell on earth. McGuirk calls it early on, after reading the rhyming couplets of the invitation—“This is awful,” paying no mind to the fact that it’s correspondence regarding an 8-year-old’s birthday—but even he shows up to the disastrous shindig, where Brendon struggles (and fails) to sugarcoat a documentary that paints the guest of honor in all the wrong lights. But even when the moviemaking is a secondary concern, Home Movies finds room for an homage. Jason promises Melissa he’ll go easy on the candy at the Mulleys’, but quickly backslides, locking the characters into an inspired, sweet-tooth riff on Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?. It’s just that kind of party.

“Shore Leave” (season three, episode one)

Melissa didn’t always get Home Movies’ best material, but she’s at the center of the series’ most tightly scripted, most satisfying installment. Concerned that his daughter doesn’t have enough positive female role models in her life, Erik enrolls Melissa in the Fairy Princess Club, a sham Girl Scouts-type outfit that tasks its members with hawking a line of useless merchandise. While she’s spending the weekend among the Fairy Princesses, Brendon’s stuck at Fenton’s, a sleepover Paula booked without consulting him. “Shore Leave” is a jailbreak episode that’s absolutely crammed with jokes, from the “Who’s On First?” walkie-talkie conversation the kids have before being shipped off to serve their sentences to Seder making a meal out of Fenton’s weird insistence on calling Brendon’s movies “video films.” The ending gets more action-movie spectacle on screen than Brendon could ever hope to capture with one of his video films, and it adds plenty of evidence in the continued softening of John McGuirk—which can only come after he runs into Melissa and drunkenly refuses to buy any of her Fairy Princess wares.

“Bad Influences” (season three, episode three)

Is a friendship as tight and codependent as Brendon and Jason’s a healthy thing? Sure, they inspire one another to ever greater heights of creativity, but they also manage to bring some pretty ugly behavior out of one another, which “Bad Influences” manifests in junk-food binges. In the interest of their well-being (and at the urging of Nurse Kirkman), the boys quit one another cold turkey, though “Bad Influences” contrasts their behavior against that of a truly toxic pairing, McGuirk and Lynch. The soccer coach and the teacher take Kirkman and a friend out on a double date, but their pissing match over whom the school nurse likes more means the guys are paying more attention to one another than they are to their dates. The fat-shaming hasn’t aged well with “Bad Influences,” but it’s worth recommending on the strengths of two memorable gags. One is a Home Movies standby that would be perfected in season three’s “Time To Pay The Price”: a rapid-fire montage through the various parodies, recreations, and genre exercises that make up Brendon’s filmography. The second is a McGuirk all-timer, a pressure cooker of insecurities that erupts all over the stage of the club where he has his double date. Never again will you be able to read the words “New York Times” without hearing H. Jon Benjamin’s voice.

“Improving Your Life Through Improv” (season three, episode four)

Comedy is hard, dying is easy, bad improv is easier, and making bad improv funny is harder still. But the seasoned improvisers of the Home Movies cast are up to the task, in this episode where a troupe of college-age volunteers comes to the school to teach sensitivity through the art of make-’em-ups. But before that centerpiece sequence, the offense that robs everyone of a Saturday: Brendon finds that he can get laughs out of his classmates with an impression of sweet, incomprehensible Junior Adelberg, leading to hurt feelings and a pair of apologetic summits between the Smalls and the Adelbergs. (Both are series highlights, though the edge goes to the Brendon-Junior chat, in which Brendon Small skillfully pivots between the characters.) Despite his newfound skills as a comic mimic, Brendon freezes up when he hits the stage with the improvisers, leaving McGuirk, in his inimitable way, to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt.

“Bye Bye Greasy” (season four, episode three)

The fourth season finds Brendon questioning his cinematic ambitions more frequently, though he’s still the only one at school with the experience to helm the student production of the bobby-socks-and-poodle-skirts throwback Bye Bye Greasy. Other episodes weave a big musical production into their narratives—like the fateful meeting between Robin Hood and King Arthur in season three’s “Renaissance”—but opening night of Bye Bye Greasy gets the most laughs, especially once McGuirk arrives for his showstopping number, which he only agrees to because he gets to drive his car onto the stage. The producers could sense that they were working on borrowed time, so the fourth season also features the welcome returns of some bygone secondary players; here, Emo Philips reprises his role as bully-with-a-heart-of-gold Shannon, who strong-arms his way into the title role of Bye Bye Greasy.

“The Wizard’s Baker” (season four, episode five)

McGuirk never fully wrests a story away from the kids, but if there’s one episode where his subplot is the main attraction, it’s this one. Brendon’s disgust with his latest project, a rock ’n’ roll fairy tale called The Wizard’s Baker, ties in nicely with the general direction of season four, while further foreshadowing Small’s full-time shift into musical comedy with Metalocalypse. But coming to know and love John McGuirk after so much Home Movies, don’t you just want to watch him try to pawn off the swords he bought in a fit of pique? He’s the type of guy who would buy ancient weapons over the phone, but more to the point, he’s the type of guy who’d feel instant buyer’s remorse about the scenario. It might only be a B-story—one that later earned a Bob’s Burgers shout-out—but hey, John McGuirk’s whole life is a B-story.

“Focus Grill” (season four, episode 13)

Quite simply one of TV’s finest series finales, with a neat full-circle hook: When Brendon, Jason, and Melissa find their very first movie, they hold a focus group to determine what the ending should be, bringing a number of Home Movies’ most valuable players off the bench. Meanwhile, McGuirk tries his hand yet again at some handyman work for Paula—he attempts to remodel her kitchen, with predictably disastrous results, in “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do”—when he attempts to build the Smalls’ new grill. The show’s central, surrogate family cemented in place, “Focus Grill” builds to a bittersweet moment of change for Brendon. McGuirk may have grown in increments throughout the course of the show, but when Brendon lets go in this last episode, it’s a signal from the show to the viewers that it’s okay to let Home Movies go, too.

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