Worst Week: 1.01 ‘Pilot’ Recap

Original Air Date: September 22, 2008

If the premiere episode indicates what’s to come, CBS definitely has a new hit comedy in Worst Week. The best part is the lead character Sam Briggs (Kyle Bornheimer), who is so not the totally clumsy buffoon promos led me to believe he is. Instead, Sam is a normal guy, whatever that means, with a decent life who happens to have the worst luck in the world whenever he’s around his girlfriend’s parents.

Once we meet that austere and humorless couple, however, it becomes all too clear why. For instance, although Sam has been with their daughter Melanie (Erinn Hayes, The Winner), aka Mel, for two years, they still snidely refer to him as only her “friend.” It’s completely understandable, then, why telling them Mel is seven weeks pregnant and they intend to get married is such a big deal requiring precise timing.

So, how many things can go wrong to make this a worst week as Sam and Mel prepare to deliver the big news to her parents? Read on…

In honor of her father’s 65th birthday, Sam is supposed to meet his girlfriend Mel’s family at 9pm for desert after a party at his job.

Sam’s drunk coworker Nicky, who apparently flirts with him all of the time, gets hammered, and Sam calls a cab to share instead of letting her drive home drunk.

Nicky repays Sam for his good intentions by vomiting on him in the cab, causing the driver to kick them out six miles from Nicky’s home.

Sam takes a shower at Nicky’s house after he walks her there in a rolling garbage can, but he quickly finds she has no towels anywhere.

While looking for something — anything — in her bedroom to dry off with, Nicky wakes up, sees him bucknaked, and jumps to the conclusion he’s trying to sexually assault her.

Kicked out with no clothes on and threats of calling the cops hanging in the air, Sam ties on a bright green trash bag like a diaper and takes an $80 cab ride to Mel’s parents’ house.

After asking Mel’s father Dick Clayton (Kurtwood Smith, That ’70s Show), a judge who obviously can’t stand him, to pay for the cab, Sam accidentally pees all over Mel’s mother Angela’s (Nancy Lenehan, My Name Is Earl) marinating goose when the lights go out and he mistakenly thinks the kitchen is the “powder room.”

Then Dick comes into the kitchen and slips and falls on his back when he steps in the pee on the floor from Sam’s “spill.”

Dick and Angela return from a trip to the hospital with the news that Dick has a concussion, just as Sam playfully tells their daughter he’ll punch her in the face after she admits she once pooped on the laundry room floor to make him feel better about the goose catastrophe.

Of course, Dick doesn’t think that’s funny, and after saying so, he heads out, where he becomes weak and falls to the ground in front of a funeral home.

The undertaker lets Dick rest for awhile and calls the Clayton home to tell them Dick is there.

Sam answers the undertaker’s call and misinterprets the news as Dick having died.

When Mel and Angela ask him to identify Dick’s body at the undertaker’s, Sam spots Dick’s glasses near a covered corpse and assumes the body is the judge. He doesn’t realize Dick left earlier when he felt better.

Back at the Clayton home, Angela blames Sam for Dick’s “death,” so he can’t refuse when Mel asks him to call Nairobi to break the news to her brother David.

Unfortunately, David’s on a cell phone and the connection is bad, which forces Sam to yell over and over, louder and louder that Dick’s dead, which upsets Angela again.

Mel then sends Sam out to buy her mother more Valium, and Sam almost immediately hits Dick’s car as he’s driving home.

When Sam drags an unconscious Dick into the house after the judge’s airbag knocks him out in the accident, Angela assumes it’s the corpse from the undertaker’s business. That’s why she screams and faints when Dick, still groggy, suddenly starts talking.

You’d think that was the end of the bad luck since it’s certainly enough. You’d be wrong, however, because although Dick and Angela prove they have a remote sense of humor when they laugh (almost inaudibly) about the recent events, fate still isn’t done with poor Sam.

He wants to tell Mel’s parents about the pregnancy at last, but she suggests he do a little something to erase some of his bad luck from their memory first. The opportunity arrives shortly when the power goes out again.

Sam rushes to the basement and even manages to get everything back on. Unfortunately, he sets his candle down in the dark to tend to the fuse box, and it ignites the nearby painting of Dick that Angela specially commissioned from a renowned artist who took a year to complete the work.

Bummer! So, Sam remains deep in the doghouse at the end of the pilot.