Review: Duncanville “Annie Oakie”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Annie is super excited about this year’s annual Oakie awards. It’s her chance to finally win an award as the best civil servant, but she’s up against some stiff competition including the dancing crossing guard and the talkative lady from the DMV. Things take a turn for the worse when Annie boots the mayor’s illegally parked car and the entire Harris family is subject to a variety of tortures both big and small in order to get Annie to unboot the car.

She manages to keep up her principles for almost a week, but gives in when the mayor promises her the Oakie award… but when it comes down to it, Annie can’t accept it like this, and ends up giving it to someone a bit more deserving: Mr. Mitch.

Our Take:

This week’s episode of Duncanville puts Annie front and center to varying degrees of effectiveness. The are some solid moments throughout when it comes to comedy, and the mayor makes an interesting adversary, but as a whole it was a little too removed from reality and a bit too predictable.

The overall plot of putting Annie’s moral compass against Mayor Jen’s corruption is a fairly good starting point for an episode. We’ve seen how serious Annie can be about her work, as well as how competitive she gets at times, so it’s easy to feel her pain at never being chosen for an Oakie before.

That said, once Mayor Jen gets involved things go off-road rapidly. It’s one thing to be parked illegally, but the mayor also has no plates and a weird truck nut display — how has she never been ticketed before? Once she confronts Annie, who declines to retract her actions, Mayor Jen goes full force on the family.

Some of the tactics are pretty funny, like when she shuts off the water to their house and only their house. (The family comes downstairs complaining about not being able to shower or brush teeth while Duncan merely smiles and says good morning — that was a genuine laugh out loud moment for me.) Some of the trials are a little too broad and silly to be funny though, like when the mayor gets animal control to launch a bag full of moles into the Harris home… like, what?

The ending of the episode might have been one of my favorite parts. Annie gets presented the award and declines it, instead offering it to someone who she thinks is more deserving: the dancing cross guard. But he also passes the buck since he stole all his dance moves. It leads to a funny chain of concessions that ends with Mr. Mitch getting some love, which is definitely nice to see since he gets paid very little to spend so much time supervising Duncan. The only thing with the ending is that I’m a little confused why Annie didn’t out the mayor, especially after her big speech about having principles and not being scared to stand up for yourself.

Annie Oakie isn’t the most interesting or overall funny episode of Duncanville this season. Annie’s not one of my favorite characters and a lot of the plot felt too telegraphed and predictable. However, there were also some genuinely good comedic beats, like when Kimberly tells Jing to cry in the mall for a distraction and Jing tells herself to think about dead Elmo. Things like that were just enough to keep me engaged in the story, but I hope next week’s episode pulls off a more complete package.