There is a thing that is all too prevalent in movies and TV, the “Talking in the Theater” scene. Characters wind up in the audience for some event – a movie, a lecture, a concert, or the like – and still talk to each other like they’re at a ball game or something. Sometimes one of the NPCs around them will Ssssh! them, but only to demonstrate how cool and important the characters are compared to the stuffy/nerdy/square/whatever NPCs. It shows that either the creators are self-absorbed narcissists who cannot even conceive of why this would be problematic in any way, or that they are lazy mechanics who don’t think of their characters as real people in real situations: theater shmeater, whatever, we need this exposition, or we need to highlight this relationship, or advance the plot to here. Probably, as usual, it’s a bit of both. People already have enough difficulty these days distinguishing being in their homes and being in public, modeling this kind of unacceptable behavior is an automatic red card. The worst thing I can say about The Catch is that this scene was like the whole show writ small.
Otherwise this episode was stupid and bad, and it makes me sad that there are people who’ve been sold on the idea that this is what “witty” and “sharp” is like. Stylish, maybe, what do I know from stylish, but it’s stylish in the same way as those godawful huge gold and jewel laden watches they like to hang on people like diving weights: ugly and shallow and yet extremely useful as a flag saying, “Avoid Me!” I’ll take that advice.
