Queer Eye Flavor-Finale Recap: Brand America Gay Again

Queer Eye

Make Ted Groovy Once again

Season 2 Episode 8

Editor'southward Rating 2 stars

Queer Eye

Make Ted Great Again

Flavour 2 Episode viii

Editor'due south Rating 2 stars

A scene from Queer Eye. Photo: Courtesy of Netfilx

My two favorite parts of this otherwise mediocre episode come at the very beginning. The first is Tan France, an English-built-in Pakistani whose last name is as continental as a breakfast of yogurt and pain au chocolat, calling America tacky. Yep, nosotros are the home of glamour shots and truck nuts, but that doesn't mean that this dude wearing a florescent beige beast-impress height has the correct to call us tacky. If anyone is going to call us tacky it's going to be us Americans. And, daughter, are we tacky.

The other best role is when the Fab 5 go to the petty boondocks of Clarkston, Georgia (population about xviii,000) and only first shouting that they want the mayor. Equally Bobby drives the conjoined twin of a pickup truck and van down the streets of this town, Karamo and the others are in the flatbed screaming from a bullhorn that they demand to know where the mayor is. Finally they come upon a lady at the coach finish who says, "I know where he is. We're friends on Facebook." The only thing that could peradventure make this scene any more 2018 is if we institute out she's also Facebook friends with a bunch of Russian hackers, and then she declared that anybody on the face up of the Globe is "cancelled."

Turns out the mayor is a lovely gentleman named Ted who is near every bit old as Al Gore's internet, and equally hairy as Bob Ross's hairbrush that Jonathan has framed in a shadowbox and hung up in his salon in W Hollywood. Ted, a Bernie Sanders delegate who has a "resistance beard" that he started growing the night Hillary Clinton lost the election, does not expect like a typical mayor. He's quite young and prefers Dickies khakis and a dirty button-down to whatever information technology is that mayors usually vesture. (A tuxedo, a tiny pinnacle hot, and a sash?)

We also get to come across Ted's girlfriend Andrea, formally called the Mayoress. She has tattoos, a partially shaved head, and stretchers in her ears. Just past the looks of them, we can come with a lot of assumptions about Ted and Andrea. They look like the kind of people who would have chickens in their lawn. They expect like the type of people that wouldn't accept a dining room table, merely would have an entire room of their house devoted to yoga. They await like the type of people that would generally decorate using Urban Outfitters tapestries on their walls and a lot of mandala-similar wall stencils. Well, it turns out all of those things are totally true.

Hither are another things about Ted and Andrea that I as well assumed just exercise not know to actually be truthful. They met in the parking lot of a Phish concert when sharing a bong shaped similar R2-D2. They're always stealing each other's "I Stand up with PP" tote numberless to go to the farmer's market. Their favorite testify is BoJack Horseman. They take at least 1 friend who is really into doing aerial silks. There is a bottle of carob-flavored lube somewhere under their bed.

OK, plenty picking on Ted and Andrea. The Fab Five have to get them ready to take delegates form Sierra Leone and the Philippines over their business firm for a dinner political party, then that is actually a large legit task. Antoni takes them to a fancy restaurant in Atlanta to show them what fine dining should look like. He and so teaches Ted how to grill peaches on some weird infrared cooking automobile that looks like information technology is role of Skynet and 1 twenty-four hour period volition help in the overthrow of mankind. The guests are suitably impressed with Ted's cooking skills, so that is a bonus.

Tan gets him to gussy up his wardrobe a chip, only not too much. He still wants Ted to exist a immature and hip mayor, just maybe non wearing the same potent khakis every mean solar day, and definitely investing in some shoes that are not awful canvas sneakers that look like all of the chickens in the lawn have been pecking at them since Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House. Tan does a good job at this, and for the dinner party Ted is wearing a blue plaid shirt, a dainty but informal blazer, and some cuffed chinos with no socks over a pair of smart chocolate-brown shoes. It's very presidential millennial.

When he was showing Ted his closet, I noticed that a lot of the labels were from H&M. I don't think this is a sponsorship deal, it'due south possibly that the production is cheaping out and getting him a bunch of disbelieve clothes. I hateful, tin't they at least spring for like J. Crew or Assistant Democracy or something? Ted is a sitting public servant.

Bobby really did a great job with the house and turned their yoga room into a dining room that looked like the private dining expanse at the 2d-best farm-to-tabular array eating place in Colombia, South Carolina. I really really did similar how he put wood detailing into the bedroom to make it look cool and Pottery Barn-ish. It now has a little bit of soul, just like a soul that you could buy from a catalog. But what the hell did Bobby do to the closet that used to be in the yoga room? He says it's gone now. Did he just cover it up? That is storage genocide and I volition not stand for information technology. We are Americans and nosotros need our things, all of our tacky things, and the closets to put them in.

The worst scene of the whole episode was when Karamo takes Ted to introduce him to the Georgia Land high school speech communication champion to teach Ted how to be a better public speaker, so that the people of the town accept him more seriously. At first I was like, "Why should we trust this kid?" simply Karamo wrapped a little lesson in there for all of us. How can Ted expect people older than him to trust his expertise if he doesn't trust the expertise of someone who was just forced to annals for the typhoon? Damn, I hate it when Karamo is right.

But that wasn't the bad part. The bad part came when Karamo got Ted to loosen up his public speaking manner by having him and this child face off in a rap battle. Um, two suburban white dudes from Georgia who probably spend more time listening to Alabama Shakes than Kanye W is an awful rap boxing going to make. Ted didn't even attempt to rhyme, he was but spouting out stats about his fourth dimension with some sort of stilted rhythm that sounded like a metronome was trying to make love to a Teddy Ruxpin doll.

While I'grand usually a big Jonathan fan and I definitely retrieve that Ted needed to do something nigh the bleached robin's nest that was on his confront, I don't really like how Jonathan styled him. The hair is fine, but as he was shortening and shortening Ted's beard, I thought information technology looked good enough to go along. Maybe just a little Ryan Gosling bristles, like that sexy footling whiff of a blonde beard, would go a long way toward making him look a little bit older and a little bit edgier than the concluding clean-shaven expect.

When Jonathan spun him around in his chair for the reveal, he sort of looked similar the high schoolhouse kid he was but in a rap battle against. Usually I call up making yourself look younger is ever a good thing, but peradventure the mayor needs a piddling chip of gravitas? I retrieve and so. I'm going to become so far as to say that he really looked better before Jonathan got his easily on him. Sorry JVN, I love yous like a radical fairy loves having sex while covered in glitter, but not this time.

This episode actually did disappoint me, though. I thought because of the title that they were going to be coming together with a bourgeois politician and making him over on the outside and trying to brand him over a little bit on the inside too. Information technology's not that progressives and radicals like Ted don't deserve to look expert and experience skillful about themselves, but what has been great about this reboot of the show is bringing people of different backgrounds and ideologies together to figure out what they take in mutual and learn from each other. Ted seemed like he could be whatever of the Fab Five's crunchy younger brother. This is the America that is already peachy. Now we just demand to work on making over the other half.

Queer Middle Season-Finale Recap: Make America Gay Once more