It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, “Frank’s Back In Business”

When you’re watching a show that’s asked you to accept that this season is built around the idea of remixing and recycling, and that episodes like “Charlie’s Mom Has Cancer” are basically reworkings of past stories, it’s a bit weird to get completely new-to-the-show stories like “Frank’s Back In Business” or “Maureen Ponderosa’s Wedding Massacre”—if we’re buying into this “recycling” theme, the least the writers can do is be consistent with it. But this and “Massacre” make a lot of sense as sister episodes, demonstrating an alternate form of recycling—they both drop the Gang into a genre-movie setup (here, Wall Street and other financial-raider movies of the ‘80s) to play around with old tropes (“Billy! That’s how you get tetanus!”), and they both dredge up characters from the show’s past and show where they came from.

But instead of the Ponderosas and McPoyles, the resurrected character here has technically been around the whole time, just dormant. CEO Frank seems to hibernate until he’s called on to cut the crusts off some shit sandwiches. And though Frank shows up at the office looking the part in suspenders, the real moment it’s clear that the Gordon Gekko switch has truly flipped is in the pause between the first and second times he asks “Did I just do your job for you?” of the poor kid struggling with the copy machine. Danny DeVito does a fine job with this turn-on-a-dime character switchover—the way his face transforms right before he brutally fires the kid, it’s like watching a malevolent multiple personality surfacing. 

And Frank does seem to be a completely different person for most of the episode. CEO Frank wouldn’t have dumpster sex involving wadded-up hamburger buns, or poop the bed for the lulz, or even hire an illiterate person as his right-hand man. He does express his horribleness in other, probably more harmful ways, but somehow, corporate piracy is more socially acceptable than eating literal garbage.

At the beginning of the episode, Frank’s in full feral form, hunting crow eggs while wearing those horrible, Penguin-esque long johns, and when called up for duty, he scoffs at Dennis’ point that Charlie can’t read and brings him along as his protégé anyway (presumably after buying him a briefcase and two sets of colorful collared shirts, suspenders, and bow ties from a fire sale at a closing production of Guys And Dolls).

I’ve always found Charlie’s weird father-son relationship with Frank endearing, and was sad for him when scowling CEO Frank canned him after his awkward soliloquy about crow eggs—a topic that Frank himself was excited about at the top of the episode. Because Charlie’s just acting the same as he always does; it’s Frank that’s changed. He’s temporarily regressed to his character from the beginning of the series, Dee and Dennis’ quasi-reasonable businessman dad, rather than a member of the Gang. And there’s the link to the season’s recycling theme: The writers didn’t bring back a plot point this time, they brought back the shady but highly competent CEO Frank who charms strippers and lives in a mansion and is not part of the Gang.

But it never feels like CEO Frank is going to stick around longer than one episode. Frank chose to abdicate his job and former life in favor of glorious squalor, and he’ll clearly be back on his and Charlie’s futon in those awful long johns after this is all over. So he doesn’t really have anything to lose in this business venture of his—he’s just having some fun. And that’s another of the episode’s themes, paralleled by the Dennis-as-LeFevre plot—that the secret to being a successful businessperson is having no actual investment in what you’re doing.

Neither Frank nor Dennis-as-Brian-LeFevre have any potential consequences for failure, nor any sense of business and negotiation as anything but a money game, and it’s a lot easier to win at Chicken when you’re playing with a remote-control car. Again called on to act as the naïve truth-speaker, Charlie’s confusion about what Atwater Capital actually makes (along with Frank’s response that “We create wealth!”) struck me as similar to one of those from-the-mouths-of-babes moral summations that South Park wields like an oar when it’s trying to make a point. It’s not that I object to the point, exactly—I exist in a constant state of low simmer about the financial sector that I’d rate at about one out of five Taibbis—but the scene seemed like a transplant from a different show.

Speaking of characters regressing, I wondered in the previous episode whether Dennis’ mom-corpse-triggered “TOO MANY FEELINGS!” breakdown would be something that the writers were going to follow up on in some sort of long-building “Dennis is a serial killer” arc. But here, he’s creepier than ever with his semi-sexual enjoyment of wearing Brian LeFevre’s, uh, skin, and overuse of the phrase “get off.” A particularly nice touch is the incredibly creepy way Glenn Howerton licks his lips as he resolves to bang the caddy he assumes is a rentboy. (Even though the writers chicken out on following through with the joke and take the low whoops-I-thought-you-were road.) Then again, the screener file titles suggest that the order of “Back In Business” and “Charlie’s Mom” was switched, so who knows about Dennis.

In any event, I found the past-version-of-character recycling more interesting than a lot of the straight plot recycling that the writers have done this season, and thought that the temporary appearance of CEO Frank was a neat contrast that really played up how disgusting Frank has become. But CEO Frank, though he's fun to visit, doesn't have the same comic potential that Feral Frank does, and the Charlie/Mac bits felt half-baked. This was particularly true in the sudden and sloppy ending, which felt as if the writers started to wrap things up, then just were all “Eh, whatever” and pushed the reset button that instantly zaps everyone back to their starting positions in the season's status quo, ready to start the next episode.

Stray Observations:

Obscure callback of the week: The label on the Fight Milk has the same outline and “WHAT UP!!!” slogan of the “dick flyer” from the third season’s “Dennis And Dee’s Mom Is Dead,” another episode dealing with Reynolds family backstory.I am conflicted over whether Dee also getting a handie at the massage parlor is a plus or minus for feminism. It was very funny and not something you see a lot on TV, whichever it was.Was hoping for some Phillies guest stars as a status symbol for the high rollers courting Dennis-as-LeFevre, but nothing doing.“Vic Vinegar, bodyguard. I don’t shake, so don’t even try.”Entertainingly, the outside shot of Atwater Capital is of a building in which a friend of mine used to work. There is a great falafel cart across the street. (This factoid in honor of the Thanksgiving discovery that my parents, after years of various incorrect permutations like “Cool story, man!” and “Nice story, bro!”, have finally mastered the use of “Cool story, bro!”)Dee takes every opportunity to do accents, and apparently Canadian = Sarah Palin.As far as I know, there is no place in Philadelphia where you can eat sushi off tits. As far as I know.

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The Office, “The Target”

If asked to identify the Office equivalent of jumping the shark, I’d go with “drowning the car.” That scene in “Dunder Mifflin Infinity”—when Michael misinterprets the instructions of a GPS device and takes a right turn into a lake—comes early in the series, but it’s affected the way I’ve viewed The Office ever since. It’s a dividing line, just as I’m sure some people see the Sabre merger or Steve Carell’s departure. In my mind, there are two Offices: before the lake and after the lake. 

Michael Scott had shown himself to be foolish before, but this was an entirely new level of foolishness. This was something bigger and broader and genuinely wackier than anything that had come before it. And The Office that came after it followed suit. From “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” forward, The Office is a much louder show, in terms of volume (see: “Dinner Party,” a great episode that’s a few passive-aggressive shouts short of being a Fawlty Towers episode) and the general broadening of the main characters. The Office, Before Lake, is a place where Dwight Maced Roy and Todd Packer regularly stopped by to shout horrible things, but it’s not a place where a Deangelo Vickers—let alone a Robert California—could’ve existed.  This is the world in which the show has existed since the fall of 2007, and it’s only rarely become unbearable.

In the show’s final season, Greg Daniels and his writers have done an excellent job of keeping the episodes based in both versions of The Office. There have been smaller, quieter moments (like Dwight and Jim on the roof of the “Work Bus”) and there have been noisier, showier moments (the basic concept of a “Work Bus”) but they’ve existed in a pleasant harmony. And nowhere has that harmony sounded sweeter than in “The Target,” a very, very funny episode with a script credited to off-season acquisition Graham Wagner. Wagner doesn’t waste his first crack at an Office episode: On the surface level, this is the most immediately quotable the show has been in recent memory. (“You’re not stupid—jazz is stupid.” “Jazz is stupid! I mean, just play the right notes!”) It also contains one of the show’s all-time great visual gags, in the form of guest star Chris Gethard attempting to deliver a sandwich that’s conspicuously wrapped around a lead pipe. 

There’s such a spectacular balance to “The Target,” which hits a Golden Ratio of approximately two-thirds pre-“Dunder Mifflin Infinity”-style material and one-third post-“Dunder Mifflin Infinity.” Jim’s lunch with Stanley and Phyllis is relatively new territory (it’s an unexpected configuration of characters, that’s for sure), but it has the free-of-major-consequences ease of an earlier season, and ends on a great note of friendly gibes between colleagues. There’s a warmth to what Pam puts into and takes out of the complaint-card tower, but it’s a variation on an old, “killing time around the office” theme—albeit a time-killer orchestrated by Plop, signaling his continued passage into New Jim territory. (And he’s harboring a mutual, unspoken crush on the receptionist, if we want to keep forcing that comparison.) 

It’s the After Lake storyline that gives “The Target” its name. That storyline is also the third of the episode most likely to rankle the Office faithful: After discovering that Oscar is sleeping with her husband, Angela wants to take drastic measures. The first act of the episode plays it cool with regard to how drastic her revenge plot is, but it gets a great act break out of Angela Kinsey with the one-word punchline “Murder.” (The response from Gethard’s low-rent hitman, Trevor: “Okay, oh… that’s the big ’un.”) It’s a solid laugh, but it also sent up a huge red flag for me: Obviously, Angela recants (with a little prodding from Dwight), but this is clearly an “After Lake” development for the character.  Not to worry, though: It’s an absurd, over-the-top reaction to a genuine slight—but it’s also in line with Angela’s severity, if not her oft-cited Christianity. In a second-season episode, that turn of events would be the kind of thing that warranted skipping past “The Target.” But this late in the game, in the topsy-turvy universe where giant dogs have roamed the hallways of Dunder Mifflin and such a ludicrous being as Gabe is allowed to exist, Angela wanting to pay for Oscar’s murder makes sense. 

“The Target” had me thinking about Noel Murray’s latest batch of Arrested Development reviews, specifically the passages about how it’s much easier to enjoy the wilder aspects of that show’s excessively wild third season if you suspend disbelief and accept the extremes of “Notapusy” or “Mr. F” because they take place in a universe of extremes. The Office comes nowhere close to approaching the heightened reality of Arrested Development’s mid-’00s America. However, in its funhouse-mirror version of Scranton, Pennsylvania, there is a Dwight Schrute, and he would be in contact with people like Trevor and hold a torch for a woman as homicidally serious as Angela. It’s not the version of Scranton the show started with, but if you’re still concerned about that, you should’ve given up a couple seasons ago.

And besides: Angela deserves to voice her hurt. She’s been betrayed by two important players in her life, and it is good the show is giving the character the chance to express that—through whatever goofy, gradually scaled-back reprisal she sees fit. The character is so guarded and petty, it’s refreshing to see her upset over something that’s not a Christmas party or a cat for once. Kinsey plays the hurt really well, without letting it overwhelm the inherent, humorous awfulness of Angela’s conclusions about Oscar’s affair with the Senator. Going too far one way or the other in her reaction wouldn’t honor the character, the situation, or the actress. It’s a silly storyline, but it’s one this sillier incarnation of The Office earns—if only for knowing where to draw the line. (I can’t overstate this: Lead pipe in the sandwich.)

Tying that storyline into the rest of “The Target” is season nine’s renewed verve toward demonstrating the loyalty among the employees of Dunder Mifflin. Oscar may have broken Angela’s heart, but Dwight won’t stand idly by while a co-worker’s kneecaps are shattered: “He’s a Dunder Mifflin man—he’s my tribe,” he tells Trevor in a manner that’s so wonderfully Dwight. By pitting the characters against one another as professional or romantic rivals with such frequency in recent seasons, it seems to me like Daniels has made it his goal for these farewell episodes to demonstrate why this is the staff that’s stuck around. It’s partially because they’re stuck there, but that’s a Before Lake theme: There are links between these people, and “The Target” reinforces those links through Dwight’s heroism and Pam’s realization that Kevin, Creed, and Meredith have become her role models—to an extent. It can still be fun to watch the characters snipe at one another (I enjoy Kevin’s “her life is a complete sham” talking head from “The Boat,” less for its gleeful cruelty and more as the catharsis to a tense storyline), but that’s not an environment worth coming back to week in, week out for nine years.

“The Target” sails to the fore of a refreshingly strong season of The Office not because of the way it recalls brighter days for the series—it’s all in the balance. It’s not only in the capable blending of the Before Lake and After Lake aspects, but in the way the episode juggles ongoing and one-off concerns as well. An ongoing thread (Jim’s sports-marketing company, which now has a horrible name: Athlead) is woven into the texture of the episode, while another (Oscar vs. Angela) is brought to a conclusion that doesn’t distract from the episodic plot of Plop building his tower and Pam demonstrating that she can finish a project as well as she can finish it. In fact, that tower provides a good symbol for “The Target” as a whole. (And the goal of getting the structure to meet the ceiling is a target in and of itself.) Perhaps the next time a TV show breaks from its obsolescence to deliver an episode as solid as this, we’ll refer to it as “building the tower.” It’s not as catchy as “jump the shark,” but it’s much more fun to watch than “drowning the car.”

Stray observations:

It matters not how swollen the list of producers on The Office has become—their opening credits shall not further obscure the pixelated crotch of Rainn Wilson.In a further honoring of the show’s past, Dwight and Angela take their warped impressions of homosexuality to Unofficial Sex Educator Toby, previously seen serving in this capacity in “Sexual Harassment.” And if you can accept that season-two Dwight didn’t know what the “female vagina” looked like, you should accept the fact that he thinks gay men have their own corresponding male vaginas.Trevor can’t show you his gun, but he has a receipt to prove how nice it is—and another to prove how nice the safe in which he keeps his expensive gun is.At lunch, Stanley orders the surf and turf, with a side of lobster. So, essentially, the surf and surf and turf.Dwight drops a number of gems while rescuing Oscar from Trevor; I’m partial to “Oh, don’t lie: I’m trying to save those precious knees you’re always bragging about.”Meredith is skeptical of Pam’s ability to earn a customer complaint: “You? Little Miss Priss? You wouldn’t fart on a butterfly. No I wouldn’t. I can’t even relate to that impulse.”This might not come across as well without Creed Bratton’s delivery or facial punctuation, but it’s definitely my favorite Creed moment of the year so far: “Remember you’re a scumbag, so you think scummy thoughts, like this.” [Scummy leer.] 

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The League, “The Vapora Sport”

The League can do as good a send-up on the perils of political correctness as any of the rest of them, but tonight’s episode, which featured a racist piano, two separate assaults on handicapped people, and a sex-sniffing dog, was too much. It wasn’t so much offensive as it was sloppily plotted and weirdly executed. When The League introduces a black, wheelchair-bound man (played by the ever-excellent J.B. Smoove) and a player piano that plays “Pick a Bail of Cotton,” it’s a safe bet that at some point they’ll collide. In “The Vapora Sport,” they do so literally, but the whole episode was a series of big jokes banging together, never quite cohering or getting as big of laughs as they should have.

“The Vapora Sport” of the title is an athletic shoe, one highly coveted by the newly declared athlete Pete. Operating on the All-American logic that the fancier your shoe, the easier it will be to start running, Pete goes for a top-of-the-line pair of sneakers, only to have the last pair snatched out from beneath his nose by the aforementioned wheelchair-bound man, who wants the extra tread for looks. There’s the obvious, repeated joke here—why does a man in a wheelchair need more tread?—but it’s undercut nicely by the fact that, honestly, Pete might as well buy a pair of house slippers for all the tread he needs. When he can’t budge a car that a fetching young lady has trouble with—instead, slipping and busting open his chin—Pete blames the shoe traction and not his (likely) weak, weak arms.

Meanwhile, Taco has trained his parents’ dog Ditka (of course the McArthurs’ parents have a dog named after Mike Ditka) to bark at the smell of sex. This is totally bizarre, but ends up being an integral part of the plot. The dog barks at the dude who installs a new player piano, leading Kevin to believe that he had gone to the bathroom to jerk off over Jenny’s short-robed presence. Ruxin uses the dog to try to determine if a partner in his firm, Michelle, is sleeping her way to the top. Instead, a sort of crazy mess happens in which Ditka anally rapes a seeing-eye dog, Ruxin pretends to be that seeing-eye dog, and a blind client tackles Ruxin to the ground. There’s some good physical comedy work here, but the scene’s haphazardness prevented it from getting as big a laugh as it might have.

The ever suffering Andre stitches up Pete’s chin for him, and at the clinic, Pete runs into the shoe-snatcher. He steals and replaces the sneakers as Andre mulls over Smoove’s request for a set of  implants that will turn his calves from “leg breasts” to “leg titties.” Kevin somehow backs over Smoove’s wheelchair on his way to return the player piano. Pete runs into them both, Kevin wheeling Smoove along on a makeshift chair, and challenges them to a race. This leads to Smoove rolling down a hill and crashing into the piano, which feebly plays out the notes of “pick a bale of cotton.” And his velous suit is more than just scuffed—it’s likely ruined. Chalk one up for Kevin.

Stray observations.

 I love that Andre’s set of reference for plastic surgery noses is the Jackson family.Though I thought the scene of Ellie singing along to the racist piano whie in a white robe was pretty heavy-handed, I am shocked that no one has thought of “The Blackface Swan” before.Jenny and Kevin have a dream for their daughter: “I just want her to do an activity that ensures she never has sex.” 

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Person Of Interest, “Till Death”

This was the first episode of Person Of Interest directed by Helen Shaver, the talented Canadian actress who shared a bed with Paul Newman in The Color Of Money and re-oriented her sexuality with Patricia Charbonneau in the 1985 indie Desert Hearts. I realized that I hadn’t been seeing her a lot onscreen in the last few years, but didn’t know that she’d been spending a lot of time directing for TV, probably because that section of her IMDB page includes a lot of titles like Judging Amy, SVU, Stargate Universe, and Joan Of Arcadia. I haven't seen enough of Joan Of Arcadia to speak with any authority on the general quality of its hand-to-hand combat scenes, but the climactic battles here aren’t as crisply calibrated as I’ve come to expect from this show, and you really want people to be hitting their chalk marks with precision and flair whenever the hero is settling his disagreements with the help of a nail gun. But Shaver’s very good with the actors and has a fine comedy sense; she’s terrific on those violent moments that shade into slapstick, such as when a testy Reese deals with an unwelcome question from Mark Pellegrino by punching him in the face. In fact, my only other complaint about this episode is that CBS broadcast it two and a half months early. It would have been one of the all-time great Valentine’s Day episodes.

Speaking of reasons to love this episode, did I mention that Mark Pellegrino gets punched in the face? Pellegrino plays a man who’s partnered with his wife in running a small publishing house, and in one of the most remarkable stretches for an actor since Marlon Brando signed on for Guys And Dolls, he doesn’t have supernatural powers and isn’t running a small publishing house against the backdrop of a savage, post-apocalyptic landscape. (Though Shaver, being Canadian, may not think there’s much difference between a savage, post-apocalyptic landscape and Manhattan; when Reese punches Pellegrino out and stuffs him in the trunk of his car for safekeeping, it’s funny, partly because no passers-by seem to take notice.)

He’s just a dude from a working-class background who’s having some problems with his wife (Francie Swift). “I always knew you were defeatist,” she hisses at him in the back of their town car after he’s made the mistake of betraying some interest in an offer to buy their company for half a billion dollars. “I never knew you were spineless!” Without even asking for permission to retort, he calls her “a stubborn, obtuse, over-indulged, pseudo-intellectual.” She spits back, “Which one of us went to Yale?” which, based on what little I know about arguments between married people, is probably some coded remark about the size of his penis. Even in a pre-apocalyptic landscape, Mark Pellegrino isn’t about to take that lying down, so he hires a friend from the old neighborhood to kill his wife, without knowing that she’s hired a hit man to kill him, nyah-nyah.

Finch and Reese are disgusted to find themselves trying to protect two people, both of whom have contracted to have blood on their hands, against their amoral selves. Early on, Finch refers to “my descent into deviant behavior,” by which he means that he’s become so adept at breaking and entering that it’s a wonder he isn’t fielding job offers from Gregory House. Now, he confesses that he’s picked up enough of Reese’s moral relativism to consider leaving the publishers to pick each other off and go find someone worth saving. Reese sees the wisdom in this, but the machine hasn’t spit out any other numbers of potentially endangered people—quiet town, New York—and both Finch and Reese have already seen the Quay Brothers exhibition at MOMA, so what else are they going to do with themselves?

They even reel in Carter, who seems happy to get away from a good-looking cop who’s such a sweet talker that he could probably ask for 50 cents in a way that made it sound like a Luther Vandross record, and Fusco, who has been stepping away from his desk to make mysterious phone calls, in a hushed voice.  Reese, of course, immediately deduces that Fusco must be up to some skullduggery, but in keeping with the theme of the episode, the poor guy is just looking for love: The call from Reese interrupts his first date with a friendly woman with a soft spot for sad-sack cops. She’s understanding, too; when the shame-faced Fusco tells her that he has to leave the “foodie” restaurant, where patrons are served subatomic portions on plates that look like an unimaginative child’s crafts project, she asks if she can tag along, and sweetens the pot by offering to treat him to a falafel. Bind that girl to you with hoops of steel, Lionel!

When the wife is informed of her husband’s plans, she sputters, “You hired Nestor, the drug-addicted lunatic, to kill me!?” She sounds as if she just found out that he’d bought her engagement ring using a coupon he clipped out of Parade magazine. For his part, Pellegrino insists that “I tried to call him yesterday and tell him I’d changed my mind, but he’s always hated you, honey.” The show can afford to kid around like this because the emotional core of the episode isn’t with the married couple but with Finch and his lost love, Grace, whose courtship shows up here in flashbacks. Grace is played by Carrie Preston of True Blood, who’s married to Michael Emerson in real life. She’s been on the show before, but this episode puts the two of them together more than ever before. They're incredibly sweet together, and they even share a kiss: You basically get to see them falling in love, and the ghost of everything that Finch has been denying himself hangs over the entire episode. In the end, only the villains get seriously hurt, but that doesn’t mean that something valuable doesn’t die.

Stray observations:

In a show with a shifting time frame like this, the writers have to learn subtle ways to remind the audience when a flashback is in effect. For instance, in a scene between Finch and his old partner, set in 2006, the partner, referring to the break-up of his own marriage, says, “You know the only thing worse than hate? Indifference.” Almost unconsciously, the viewer recognizes that this exchange isn’t taking place today, because if it was, the last line would have to be, “Indifference, and the makeup jobs on Tom Hanks in Cloud Atlas.”

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Film: Great Job, Internet!: Caption Contest: What's Brad Pitt saying to James Gandolfini in Killing Them Softly?

In the interest of science, creativity, and the science of creativity, we're going to begin posting a film or TV still every week, and we're going to ask you to come up with a clever caption. Whoever's caption gets the most likes will win some kind of nonsense prize from The A.V. Club office, most likely a Simpsons toy of some sort. Last week's winner is Wide World Of Sporks, who captioned the Red Dawn photo thusly: "Man, these Abercrombie & Fitch ads are really edgy this season." Well done, Mr. Of Sporks. We'll be in touch about a prize.

Make sure you post your caption as a new comment, not as a reply, so we can sort out the winner. And though we know you'll be tempted to go for the easy, gross joke, remember that our commenting policy isn't out the window here. This week's still comes from the supposed-to-be-good new Brad Pitt movie Killing Them Softly, which opens today. My caption, to get you started:

"So did you die or not? Are they gonna come kill you now?"

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Video: Taste Test Video: Ghost pepper sorbet and limoncello chocolate at the National Chocolate Convention

Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club regularly features Taste Tests. Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at tastetest@theonion.com.

The National Chocolate Show and Fine Chocolate Show—two linked events held in Chicago earlier this November—aren’t nearly on the scale of the annual Sweets & Snacks Expo, which a bunch of us attend every year so we can come back to the office laden down with bulging bags of new and exciting mass-market products. Unlike the Sweets & Snacks Expo, which is a massive trade and media event, the Fine Chocolate Show is open to the public, for a hefty ticket price; it’s also a commercial venue, where the public can taste products (a certain number of “tasting tickets” come with each admission) and then buy them direct from the maker. The National Chocolate Show, meanwhile, is a trade and media event held in the same hall at Chicago’s touristy Navy Pier, but separated from the Fine Chocolate Show by a moderately guarded curtain. Genevieve Koski, web producer Sarah Collins, and I spent a Saturday flitting between both events; while Genevieve taste-tested a handful of products and Sarah filmed her for the video above, I hit the booths, talking to chocolatiers and their minions about their most interesting products and where to get them.

Mentioned in the video: 

Palazzolo’s Gelato is based out of Fennville, Michigan and has an amazing array of flavors—Genevieve missed out on the Oatmeal Stout and the Dark Venezuelan Couverture, for instance. The CEO, Pete Palazzolo, gave us a tour of the truck (sadly, it’s only really used for trade shows and charity events, so it can’t be found roaming the streets) and a rundown of his business, which extends to providing gelato for retailers—he said they can be found in more than 180 Walgreens, for instance—and putting other people in business with trucks or storefronts. Genevieve gripes in the video that the gelato is too frozen; clearly she wasn’t around when he warned that you should always let gelato thaw for a few minutes so it’s pleasantly soft, and also so the freshly exposed top doesn’t get covered with ice crystals “which is the air freezing on the surface, and you know what that air is? The stuff everybody in this room has been breathing out all day.” Palazzolo was a fascinating dude, and we’re hoping he follows through on his suggestion that he might send us some of his savory gelatos—like French Onion, garlic, and sausage—for a later Taste Test.Le Chocoholique sent us the fancy unfolding chocolate-box seen in a Mailbag video a couple of weeks ago, and was at the show handing out super-fancy truffles, including the adorable wee chocolate espresso cups with truffley fillings. These guys made some of our favorites. For instance, the “Velvet Elvis,” a peanut butter, banana, and bacon chocolate.

Other highlights:

Mrs. Prindables makes gigantic fancy caramel apples covered with chocolate, and then sometimes layered with nuts, or SnoCaps, or anything else that could be persuaded to cling to caramel. Some of these things looked like Katamari Damacy projects. We asked the lady running the book how anyone was supposed to eat them. She suggested cutting them up and sharing them. So basically they’re the gift that will hopefully give right back to the giver.

Puffs Of Doom has a menu of 300 artisan creampuffs, including both sweet and savory varieties. They have a Chicago food truck, but also take online orders and have a Christmas-gift pack and a “Puffs Of The Month” Club. It practically goes without saying that these things are rich and delicious.The proprietor of Gabriella Chocolates told us we'd be underselling her “cake truffles” if we called them cake pops or cake balls. So we won’t. (They kinda are, though. High-end ones.)The owner of Quintessential Chocolates warned everyone at her booth not to bite into her alcohol-filled chocolates, and to eat them whole instead. We found out why the hard way. These things are straight-up filled with a very wide assortment of delicious boozes, which means if you bite them, they squirt and make a mess. It was worth it, though. The company has a good-sized range of alcohols, including wine-filled chocolates for those who want to cut to the chase on the chocolate-pairing idea.Speaking of which, the show featured six different chocolate wines, plus a double-chocolate vodka. We’re hoping to get some of those in for a later taste test as well. Four of the wines were reds with chocolate notes (two from infused cocoa syrup), two were closer to cream liqueurs but had wine infused, and all of them were better than Chocovine, which we’ve already taste-tested. Easily the most unusual stuff at the show was from Divine Organics, which markets things like pili-nut butter, “MacMulberry brittle” (chocolate with macadamia nuts and mulberries), and something called “Bliss Mix,” a trail-mix-esque blend involving goji berries, cacoa nibs, and macadamia nuts, among other ingredients. It all seemed suspiciously healthy for a chocolate show, but the literature was hyperinformative—for instance, they sell dried Irish moss, which it turns out is used as a binding agent in place of eggs in raw vegan snacks.And finally, here’s a chocolate rooster, one of a series of elaborate sculptures built onsite by the French pastry school of Chicago’s Kennedy-King college. Very pretty, guys, but seems like a waste of good chocolate, no?

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TV: AVQ&A: Celebrities we hope stay scandal-free

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at avcqa@theonion.com.

Genevieve Koski asks: Our recent discussion of appalling celebrity behavior or beliefs got me thinking about the way our culture gleefully consumes celebrity scandal, particularly when it comes to unlikable celebrities. But what about likeable celebrities? The recent wave of accusations levied at Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash seemed to spark far more genuine disappointment than schadenfreude, which can’t be said for most celebrity sex scandals. So in that vein, what celebrity would you be genuinely upset to see caught up in scandal?

Genevieve Koski
There are probably a lot of people who would like to see relentlessly likeable all-around good guy Tom Hanks taken down a couple pegs, but I’m certainly not one of them. Judging by the way he’s evaded any sort of blowback for things like recently dropping the F-bomb on Good Morning America and the ongoing sideshow that is his son Chet Haze, Hanks seems all but immune from scandal, and I have no problem with that. He’s this generation’s Jimmy Stewart, a seemingly unassailable nice guy who manages to maintain an air of respectability no matter what he does, while somehow avoiding coming across as hopelessly bland. (Anyone who doubts this should check out Hanks’ absolutely delightful recent appearance on the Nerdist podcast.) If it were to come out that he were, say, cheating on his wife, or a secret Scientologist, I’d be legitimately bummed.

Tasha Robinson
I’ve confessed my soft spot for Neil Patrick Harris before in AVQ&As, and I suspect much of that comes from the persona he projects, of a really happy guy who’s openly delighted to be singing and dancing at the Tonys, or doing magic tricks on Ellen, or, y’know, actually acting on TV and in film. And the information that’s come out about his personal life—seemingly happy relationship with an equally cute young dude, adorable babies they adopted together—just fits the picture. Maybe it’s all manufactured PR, who knows. And who cares, really? His enthusiastic sweet-guy persona is an antidote to all the venom and snotty ennui out there these days, and if he’s secretly running a series of child sweatshops or enjoys hunting endangered animals for laughs, I don’t want to know. Not so much because I enjoy being deluded as because whenever a celebrity scandal breaks, it brings out everyone who hated the scandal-ee all along and now feel justified in expressing it in the ugliest possible ways, and I just don’t want to deal with those people. When it comes to wool over the eyes, though—if anyone ever finds out anything terrible about Jim Henson posthumously, I just plain don’t want to know, for the sake of my own soul. 

Claire Zulkey
Charles Barkley had a point when he declared that athletes shouldn’t be role models (which, perversely, is one of the many reasons I very much like Sir Charles) but still, I can’t help but hold my breath a little bit for Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose, who is currently on the disabled list for the foreseeable future, unfortunately. For such a young and successful star (last year, he was the youngest player to be voted the NBA’s MVP award) he has a remarkable reputation for humility, shyness, and selflessness, especially known for his gratefulness to his mother. All of this is made even more endearing by the fact that he’s a hometown hero. He seems like a sensitive soul. When Rose plays, I cringe whenever he screws up, because it seems evident that he tortures himself for letting down his teammates. More recently, he refused to answer a reporter’s question about his personal life—then apologized for doing so. I just want to hug him. Wild amounts of success and sports can be a dangerous combination. We’ve seen so many stars sink low after personal problems and misguided egotism. While Michael Jordan’s athletic legacy in Chicago can never be denied, I don’t think too many people particularly like the guy anymore. I hope Derrick always maintains his humble personality, that he doesn’t do anything epically stupid to let me down—or the rest of Chicago. Rose isn’t perfect, of course. His SAT scores were invalidated due to possible (but unproven) cheating, and some people (like my mom) would take issue with the fact that he had a baby out of wedlock. But for a pro athlete, he seems like a good and genuine guy, and I hope I always feel that way.

Will Harris
Bryan Cranston becomes increasingly despicable over the course of Breaking Bad’s run, but having talked to him on two separate occasions for The A.V. Club and either chatted with him or just generally interacted with him on several other occasions, I would be left flabbergasted and bumfuzzled if I ever learned he’d done something scandalous. I know he’s on his second marriage, but if there was any controversy involved with the end of that relationship, it’s never surfaced (they were divorced in 1982, and by all reports remain friends), and it certainly seems like he’s happily remarried with children, given that the one time his personal life has come up in one of our past conversations, it was the context of how he sometimes feels guilty about not being home at night as often as he’d like, and that he wasn’t scheduling anything during his daughter’s spring break so the whole family could go with her on her tour of possible colleges. Plus, while it’s common knowledge how he worked for years with little recognition, he just seems so darned honored and humbled by the success and recognition he’s found through his work on Breaking Bad. Basically, what I’m saying is, don’t let me down, Bryan Cranston. We know you’re an outstanding actor—hell, you’ve got the Emmys to prove it—but please don’t turn out to be anything other than the swell fella you seem to be.

Marah Eakin
Bryan Cranston is a good one. In that same vein, I’ll say that I’d be kind of P.O.ed to see Jon Hamm get into hot water. While I don’t think he’s a squeaky-clean dude—I’ve seen the drunk photos online and I’ve heard him make hilarious off-color, borderline-offensive jokes on almost every podcast out there—that’s fine with me. What I wouldn’t be fine with is him crossing some sort of invisible line of decency and getting involved in some porn-star sex scandal or racist-slur rant. He just seems like too good a dude for that. It wouldn’t be sexy or funny or smart. Instead, it would just make him look sad, and that’s not what I want from one of my icons of coolness. While a little bit of grit makes Hamm look all the better to me, a lot would just be depressing.

Kyle Ryan
I know I’m guilty of projecting Mrs. Coach’s attributes onto her in real life, but what I’ve read about Connie Britton makes her sound not too far removed from her role on Friday Night Lights. That is to say, down-to-earth, compassionate, and fiery—that mix of friendliness and frankness made more winning by her Southern accent. I will pretty much watch her in anything, and I definitely wouldn’t be watching Nashville if she weren’t the star. So if she came out as a Holocaust-denier or birther or truther, it’d bum me out, though I guess I could always retreat into old episodes of Friday Night Lights. Sean O’Neal, who met her while the show was shooting in Austin, tells me she has kind of a hippie-ish Lilith Fair thing going on in real life, which should raise my punk-rock hackles, but it doesn’t. Connie Britton rules.

Jason Heller
It’s highly unlikely that singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman would ever become embroiled in a scandal, since that would mean the world at large had started paying attention to him, which has never and will never happen. But for diehards like me, any hint of sleaze would totally obliterate the image of Richman I hold and cherish, one that’s he’s cultivated for decades—that of an elfin, ageless, Peter Pan-like troubadour who revels in the finer points of ice cream and dinosaurs. “Dancing In The Lesbian Bar” is the most suggestive thing he’s ever written, but even then, it’s wholly silly and celebratory. I’m sure Richman is just a regular human like the rest of us, and anyone who slept on Lou Reed’s couch during his Velvet Underground days surely witnessed some kind of depravity in his life. I’m totally fine with depravity—but Richman’s music is where I go when I want to pretend such things don’t and couldn’t exist. 

Nathan Rabin
I’m really glad I did not see Being Elmo, because I’m not sure my fragile heart can handle the kind of disillusionment associated with the Kevin Clash stories, regardless of what the actual truth might be. I had to search my heart long and hard for this AVQ&A before settling on Bob Newhart, a man so kindly and benevolent, he’s everybody’s dream grandfather. It also helps that he’s a comic genius, albeit of the buttoned-down variety. I would hate for anything to sully Newhart’s good name, so while some of my pals who saw him live last year (I had tickets but could not go) and said he did some racially problematic material, I didn’t want to believe it. I chalked it up to Newhart’s age and the times he was raised in, but I don’t think I could bear to hear anything more negative about the man, beyond his material being dated and a little insensitive. 

Sam Adams
I try not to hold famous people to a standard higher than the one to which I hold myself, which is to say they’re allowed to do dumb crap on a regular basis. But it would be hard to deal if Jon Stewart fell from his mid-height pedestal. I’m past revering artists as gods, but there are days when Stewart seems like the most reasonable man in America, the only one who can kiss our political wounds and make them feel better; there’s no one I’d rather have hold my hand while I’m watching Fox News. Plus he mentions his wife and kids just often enough to seem happy at home without subjecting them to undue scrutiny, never an easy line for a celebrity to walk. I can handle him doing the occasional softball interview with subjects who merit a more thorough grilling, but worse than that, I don’t even like to imagine.

Zack Handlen
I can’t pick a favorite member of Monty Python, but I can tell you which one I think is the nicest: Michael Palin, in a walk. Which isn’t to say that Palin only played nice-guy roles on Flying Circus—he could do thugs, twerps, and homicidal barbers as well as anyone. He just projected a basic air of decency and chummy British kindness while doing so, often to great comedic effect. Since Python broke up, Palin has been in some great movies (his turn as the charming torturer in Brazil works so brilliantly in part because he seems so pleasant and non-threatening; it’s like finding out your local librarian collects human skin), and he’s done a fair bit of TV, including a series of travel shows which follow him on his journeys around the world. In my mind, Palin is the ideal Englishman, reasonable and curious and fundamentally good-hearted, and while that’s an awful lot for anyone to live up to, everything I’ve read and heard about him has only worked to confirm my assumptions. If he turns out to be a bigoted serial murderer who strangles puppies in his spare time, I’d rather not know. 

Joel Keller
I agree with Tasha that NPH looks like he’s so happy to have a dynamic career, and he’s been so relatively open about his personal life in the last few years that I hope it stays that way. But if there’s any young-ish actor who looks like he’s just loving life right now, it’s his How I Met Your Mother co-star Jason Segel. It strikes me that Segel’s work ethic is always blue-collar, or at least as blue as your collar can get in show business: show up, do the work, have a smile on your face, enjoy yourself. It’s the reason he’s stuck with HIMYM, though his movie career has advanced further than that of any of his co-stars. And that sense of joy is the reason he was able to pull off a more-than-decent revival screenplay for The Muppets while doing all his other work. It isn’t often that an actor who’s known for going full frontal in Forgetting Sarah Marshall can also be squeaky-clean enough to write and star in a Muppet movie; we need these kinds of all-purpose, happy-to-be-here guys in Hollywood, and I just hope he doesn’t get waylaid by a scandalous tabloid-drenched relationship and breakup, or something even worse.

Todd VanDerWerff
I don’t even know why, but I would really like Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell to make this whole “celebrity couple” thing work out. I can’t say I was a huge Shepard fan before he joined the cast of Parenthood (one of my favorite shows), but he’s become someone I really like over time. Bell, for her part, has been one of my favorite actors since the Veronica Mars days. I try not to do that whole thing where you imagine that celebrities are your friends or whatever, since that’s creepy and weird and the provenance of middle-aged fan-fiction writers. (And a past AVQ&A.) But I can’t help but think that if Dax and Kristen just gave my wife and me a chance, we’d be the very best of couple friends. But even outside of my horrifyingly mundane fantasies (we play so much Outburst!), they seem to have a solid relationship, and they seem like nice people who just happen to be famous. I’ll probably be as unhappy when they inevitably split up as I was when Will Arnett and Amy Poehler did. I mean, have you seen that sloth video?!

Scott Tobias
Watching Louis CK perform in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded again of how funny and vital he is as a stand-up—he offered a chaff-free 90-minute set of material that he’ll junk after the tour, and start rebuilding again—and also how I was sitting in a seat purchased directly from his website, sans exorbitant Ticketmaster service charges. And while it’s true that very few entertainers have the profile to create a DIY system for concert tickets and $5 performance videos like Live At The Beacon Theater, it’s nonetheless a great, no-fuss gesture from a guy who sympathizes with fans who hate dealing with corporate price-gouging and proprietary rights. He also happens to be the writer-director-star of TV’s most personal, formally inventive show. And yet, unlike with some of the names offered here, there’s always the threat that Louis CK could be engulfed in scandal, because those flames have licked at him before. Earlier this year, CK was slated to host the Radio & Television Congressional Correspondents dinner until Fox News’ resident Sarah Palin fluffer Greta Van Susteren raised a fuss about his use of the “C-word” to describe the would-be vice president in a drunken airplane Twitter rant. Rather than become fodder for the cultural outrage machine, the politics-averse comedian immediately dropped the gig. Onstage, CK regularly ventures into dangerous territory—the new tour has a brilliant bit weighing the things we know are right (“Of course”) with the terrible things we think anyway (“But maybe…”)—but he has the talent to finesse it and make it edgy rather than simply offensive. There’s always the future possibility that he won’t be able to pull out of that tailspin and he’ll be held up for mass shaming like Tracy Morgan, who he defended vigorously at the time. It was a reminder that comedians like CK toe the ledge of public opinion; here’s hoping he never falls off.

Keith Phipps
Like the rest of the world, my wife and I were shaken by the separation of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, who always seemed like a model of a cool, modern couple. Now, in the wake of the Poehler/Arnett split mentioned above, that pretty much just leaves Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo as models of how to stay married while remaining vital. For all I know, they’re actually running a Pink Flamingos-like slavery ring out of their basement and they fight all the time, but they seem like they have it together, enjoy what they’re doing, and remain committed to keeping a creative spark alive. It would be a shame to find out otherwise.

Steven Moore
The closest Conan O’Brien has ever come to a scandal was as a victim, when NBC cheated on him by going to bed with their ex. He handled that fiasco remarkably well, taking the high road by leaving the Tonight Show instead of screwing over Jimmy Fallon or damaging the integrity of the longstanding show, and even gave his staff roughly a third of his severance pay. And in addition to being the funniest man on late night, his list of goodwill is endless: He met his non-celebrity wife of 10 years on set during a skit, he’s politically moderate, founded an anti-hunger non-profit with his Harvard roommate, donated his Super Bowl commercial money to charity, and was ordained as a minister to perform the same-sex marriage of a member of his staff. But as seen with another limber redhead, even the implication of a scandal can end a career. And if that happens, I fear the worst would be yet to come; the première clip of Conan and hints of obsession in Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop were dark enough, I couldn’t bear to see it happen in real life.

Cory Casciato
I’ve quickly become a big fan of Kristen Schaal, especially for her fantastic work bringing Mabel Pines to life on Gravity Falls. That’s just the tip of a wonderful Schaal iceberg, though—she’s pretty much awesome in everything I’ve seen her in, and I’m looking forward to seeing her in lots more over the years to come. That is, unless some kind of horrible scandal derails her. It would probably take something pretty big, though—she already wrote a sex book, albeit a humorous one, and we’re getting to the point where a sex tape is less a scandal than a ho-hum career hiccup, kind of like an arrest for drugs became years ago. So long as she steers clear of murder cults, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, and racist politics, she should be okay, and I should still be able to watch the unfolding of her glorious career as one of TV and film’s funniest and most charismatic character actors.

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