Hump, Marry, Kill: Ja’mie King Is Totally Quiche

Hump: You know who’s super quiche? Ja’mie King. I can’t decide how I’d feel about her if I were actually still in high school. After seeing Mean Girls — besides general hope for Lindsay Lohan’s career (sigh, the way you were, LiLo) — my main emotional reaction was an overwhelming rush of relief that I was no longer a teenager who had to deal with queen bees and their lackeys.

But, I lovedddddd Summer Heights High and think that Chris Lilley is a comedy writing genius. And, as a twentysomething who’s (thankfully) detached from the whole high school situation, I watch Ja’mie: Private School Girl with the same feeling of fear that most adults have of egotistical, manipulative teenagers. She’s a total nightmare, and several critics have even pointed out that there may be a little too much Ja’mie in the show — versus Summer Heights High, which focused on three protagonists all played by Lilley.

Nevertheless, what I find most interesting isn’t just Lilley-as-Ja’mie, it’s how he writes the other characters' reactions to her. School administrators try to discipline her, but they’re as afraid to put Ja’mie in her place as her parents. They're convinced their daughter is a go-getter. As the audience, we can see the reality of the situation: Ja'mie is just a petulant, spoiled child walking all over her mom and dad. And, let’s be honest — it’s pretty f*cking funny to watch. Although, I hope that statement didn’t just karmically guarantee that I'll have my own egomaniacal queen bee daughter one day.

Marry: Getting On, a remake of a British show of the same name, is an all-too-real look at life inside the geriatric ward of a hospital. I’m fairly sure you need to be a living saint to work there. Whether or not you consider this a comedy depends on your exposure to life’s more grim realities. But, Alex Borstein (a.k.a. Ms. Swan on MADtv and the voice of Lois Griffin) does a fantastic job portraying a put-upon nurse dealing with deceased patients, doctors who want her to catalog and save fecal samples, and the equally great Niecy Nash from Reno 911.

Kill: I get what you were going for with the clever and cutesy all-rhyming episode, How I Met Your Mother, but yeesh, did this try way too hard. None of the three stories Marshall told Marvin on the bus (under the contrivance that “he only falls asleep to rhymes” — really glad that’s not the case with my new nephew) moved the series' storyline forward at all, although the same can be said for many of the show's final episodes. Still, as thin as this season has been on plot, at least we’re not subjected to a solid 22 minutes of ABBA, ABAB, AABA quatrains that give me flashbacks to Shakespeare class in college.