Review: Duncanville “Who’s Vroomin’ Who?”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

When Annie takes Duncan bowling, she’s determined to make it a fun mother/son night out, but what she doesn’t take into account is how he’d rather hang out with his friends instead of his mom. She feels low when he ditches her, until the two of them start to bond over stock car racing and become the perfect team.

Meanwhile, Jack is trying to remodel Jing’s room, as she tells everyone it’s too little for her these days. She stays in Kimberly’s room in the meantime, and the two of them get to know each other more. Kimberly tells her all the hot goss while Jing introduces her big sister to her favorite preschool TV show. It turns out all she wanted to do was hang out with her big sis; the room was fine all along!

Our Take:

Duncanville moves to Monday nights now with the third episode of season two. Who’s Vroomin’ Who? isn’t quite as tight as other episodes of the show, but it has a certain chaotic energy that makes for some pretty big laughs. This is the kind of show where a fifteen year old can hug his mother one minute and aliens are landing in the forest the next.

The basic A plot this week is a mother/son story, as Annie tries to spend time with Duncan while he tries to escape from under her thumb. They go bowling and Duncan ditches her, than they start racing together and all’s well until Duncan gets tired of being called a Momma’s Boy and ditches her again. Annie is forced to admit that perhaps she’s been prioritizing her own happiness over what’s best for her son. Some shows might end with that revelation, but this is Duncanville, and Duncan is a pretty accurate representation of most fifteen year olds, so he quickly calls his mom back over because he can’t do much himself.

The B story revolves around Jing and Kimberly, and it’s a bit less successful for me. Jing is supposedly growing too old for her current room layout, and she enlists Jack to redo it for her. He’s the least involved member of the family this episode, but does have a few great moments like singing an off-key version of Wrecking Ball while trashing his daughter’s room. That’s definitely one of the highlights of this storyline, as the rest of it mainly involves Kimberly grudgingly teaching Jing bad habits like gossiping and putting down other women.

Jing felt a bit off to me this week. Her character worked well the first couple episodes, occasionally contributing funny one-liners that didn’t feel too out of place for a tiny tyke. When she’s carrying more of the episode however, it requires her to be more talkative, and a handful of her lines stood out as being ‘things a 40 year old screenwriter thinks a kid would say’. Especially the end reveal that Jing purposefully lied about needing her room remodeled just to spend time with her sister — the usual Jing would’ve just moved into Kimberly’s room without warning.

Who’s Vroomin’ Who? is a solid episode of Duncanville. There were a few things that pulled me out of the story, like Jing’s character issues and Annie’s mid-race distraction (really?), but overall it was a fun episode with plenty of good stuff: Jack’s solo and Jing’s love of her TV show were hilarious. This week may not have been an all out winner of a race, but sometimes all you can ask is that the good outweighs the bad.