Watch TV shows online free with full episode links on The TV King.

Things are taken down a notch in the second episode of the second season of Showtime’s Sunday night series Episodes. Picking up exactly where episode one left off at with Sean Lincoln (Stephen Mangan) sleeping with his series Pucks leading lady Morning Randolph (Mircea Monroe), returns to work the next day.  And then the ratings come in. Things are not good on the ratings front and further more, pesky Pucks star Matt LeBlanc (played by Matt LeBlanc) is still trying to win over Sean and Beverly after he slept with Beverly (Tamsin Greig) ruining their marriage.  So how much worse could things get?

That’s a delicate question to ask.

Episodes is an interesting series as it really showcases Matt LeBlanc as a pretty good actor who is good at playing something else other than Joey from Friends.  But if you had to look at season one as a whole, besides a great cast, the show tonally was all over the place during its first season.  Season one really felt like each episode deserved to be an hour long; incomplete episodes that usually rounded themselves out by the following half-hour. And this is nothing against the cast mind you but besides LeBlanc, the show also just wasn’t that funny unless you knew anything about anything about how Hollywood and making television shows work.

Being a television fan, it is easy to get all the humor that the show was trying to have fun with and all the types of people in the industry and how things are done that the show creators David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik were trying to lampoon. If you were not however, Episodes came off very all over the place with out any real winning characters who were fully formed or who at least seemed as such.  For as much as Sean seemed wining and rootable, at the least him and Beverly both seemed more whining during season one, and the show seemed dead-set on making fun of how right the British were and how wrong the American Executives were. 

This is all well and good if you find Hollywood hi-jinx funny, or if you like the whole British vs. American way of doing things. The only character that seemed to work from the start was Matt LeBlanc as himself.  So when Season one ended with Matt sleeping with Beverly, and shattering her marriage with Sean but with making matters worse is that the show Pucks! Is picked up to series, it would lead to tons of problems for season two.  Yet when we began season two with last week’s episode, Sean and Beverly were being adults about working together despite being split and it just seemed heartbreaking. Even more odd is that LeBlanc really missed talking to Sean as a friend, which he ruined due to sleeping with Sean’s wife.

And season two hasn’t stopped complicating matters for Sean and Beverly. Merc’s wife, Jamie Lapidus (Genevieve O'Reilly) who is blind, apparently is interested in Matt LeBlanc. So much so that in the first episode of season two she gives him a handjob. Episode two of season two complicates matters further as LeBlanc tells Sean “-got a little blowie and a fuckie, but no handjob.”  Merc also has his own problems as not only does Pucks! continue to drop in week two ratings-wise, Andy Button (Joseph May) the guy who Merc fired in season one for being an idiot who loved the talking dog show idea is suing Merc. Merc apparently uses the word ‘cocksucker’ too much, and being Andy is gay, is saying he was fired for being gay.

So far, season two has showcased a much better grasp of the characters and the tone of the show.  While season one seemed to offer two shows in one: Sean and Beverly being out of their element and LeBlanc, this season has been flowing very nicely.  Everything seems to be building to a common ground that is refreshing for Episodes and tonally feels on the right track.  Now the question is can Episodes keep this up? Two episodes in, I’d be a betting man and say yes. But I could be wrong.