A Certain Slant of Light

Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching: 2 Broke Girls. Because two girls in an opposites attract friendship who are working to open a bakery together! Who clearly have the very best time hanging out together! I mean seriously, you can just see them smirking at each other during their funny scenes, they clearly think that they’re a total hoot and it just looks like they’re having so much fun.

I wish the producers were less fond of ethnic stereotypes, but I love Max & Caroline’s dynamic so much that I will put up with anything the producers throw at me in order to get my fix. Curse you, producers! So while I do wish more people watched this because I think Max & Caroline are so delightful, I also want more fellow viewers because then I will have someone with whom to share my shame.

Have fallen in love with 2 Broke Girls! And it is a guilty pleasure indeed, because the writers clearly never met a racial stereotype that they didn’t like.

But despite the fact that it regularly makes me die a little inside, I love this show because it is an opposites attract comedy about two twentysomething girls and their friendship. The heroines are Caroline, an Upper East Side heiress who just lost all her money when her father was indicted for fraud, and Max, the sarcastic and world-weary waitress at the Brooklyn diner where Caroline applies for a job.

They get off to a rocky start. Having heard Caroline’s sob story, Max is all, “Should I feel sorry for you?”

“I don’t expect that at all!” says Caroline, with a socialite smile. Then, more seriously: “But just so you know, a well-adjusted person totally would.”

Max, with an insouciant shrug: “I'm dead inside.” (Max reminds me a little of Jaye from Wonderfalls. Crossover time, am I right?)

But naturally by the end of the first episode, they end up being roomies: Max, Caroline, and Caroline’s horse Chestnut, who lives in the backyard. I have no idea how they can afford to feed Chestnut, but - horse!

Chestnut actually manages to establish a certain presence in the story, too. Max and Caroline will just be hanging around their kitchen, making cupcakes for their fledgling cupcake business...and there’s Chestnut, milling around outside the back window.

The cupcake business! This is the series’ (or at least the season’s) overarching plot: Caroline, graduate of Wharton business school (as she mentions approximately twice an episode), swoops into Max’s life with a plan to save them both from an eternity waitressing: they will build from the cupcakes Max has been making for the diner until they have a cupcake empire! Or at least a cupcake store. “We have got to work on your self-esteem,” she informs Max, when Max dismisses this plan as unrealistic.

Caroline is incredibly spoiled and upbeat and ought to be grating, but she’s so sincere and unselfconscious and secretly just a bit lost beneath - because she’s always had everything handed to her and has lost everything; because that loss means her old friends won’t speak to her; and most of all because she idolized her father and now he’s in jail.

Plus there's a horse. I mean, a horse. How can you not love a show with a random horse?