1x01 The Best Christmas Ever

Holy crap, what an impressively bleak, darkly funny way to end the season. (I'm watching in production order rather than airing order.) Orel taking Reverend Putty's X-mas sermon to mean that his little brother is the second coming of Jesus is his best misinterpretation yet, and the way he dotes on Shapey is pretty cute in its ridiculous. But the bit with Orel's parents was so, for lack of a better term, real. It was jarring, in a good way, how the episode cut back and forth between a blithe Orel being convinced that his brother was the lord, and the stark and frank conversation his parents were having about Shapey being the product of an affair. It's a nice way to communicate the obliviousness of children to the more serious things happening with the adults in their parents, and actually accentuated the comedy.

There was also something legitimately affecting about the long drifting shots of Orel's mom by herself, and his dad sitting at the bar with Coach Stopframe (who has to be Shapey's real dad -- that's the implication, right?). Even the quiet moment where Orel is standing alone in front of the creche after his mom tells him that she and his dad are getting a divorce as she drags Shapey away is striking in how sad it is. And that last scene, where Orel has faith and prays to God to make it better, waiting and waiting until the episode just ends -- devastating. What a bleak but poignant statement about religion and belief in a show that has, thus far, hewed more toward satire than such directness. Very impressive.