Review: Duncanville “Jurannie Park”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Annie’s having a bad start to the morning, but she’s not about to let it affect her work day. So instead of staying home and watching Maury like Kimberly suggested, she heads out to do her job. Except everything goes wrong and she winds up being put on suspension by the mayor and replaced with Mr. Mitch.

While the easygoing educator turns the parking enforcement office into a big joke, Annie tries to replace her identity as a government worker by turning to birds, but things start to go too far and the birds wind up taking over their house. They steal Jing’s show and tell thunder and Kimberly’s man. The birds overpower the family, but together with the town, they manage to trick the birds into leaving.

Our Take:

Last week’s Duncanville episode was definitely a stand out, complete with an interesting Kimberly storyline that even involved a flashy musical number. While this week’s episode doesn’t quite make as big an impression, it still manages to stand out in its own way—mainly because it’s one of the more ‘out there’ episodes of the show I can remember.

The Harris family getting run out of their own home by dozens of bird species isn’t something I ever would’ve thought up, but it kind of works in a weird way once you get past the impossibility of it all. The show has played with breaking logical boundaries before, but I don’t think it’s ever done it in such a main, A-plot type of way. The birds turn into real antagonists by the end of things, which is kind of fun to see since we usually don’t get straight up baddies from Duncanville. (That Kyle was the evilest of them all!)

There’s also plenty of fun bits with the birds that mainly involve humiliating the Harris’s. Jing’s magic trick at show and tell getting upstaged by the birds isn’t too crazy, but Kimberly’s adopted bird friend takes things to new heights of insanity. Her myna-like bird copies voices, so she tries to get it to talk to the boy she likes on the phone. Things go too well, however, and the bird ends up courting her man. It’s very strange but pretty funny and hey, maybe after dating a bird he’ll be ready to settle on her.

The way the conclusion ends up involving everyone in town helping to sell the illusion of winter is nice to see. This season has been using a lot more background characters than the last one, I feel like, sometimes at the expense of more main characters. We’ve gotten a lot of the mayor, but I don’t think we’ve seen as much Mr. Mitch this season. Luckily, both of them feature pretty prominently here.

Jurannie Park is without a doubt one of the weirdest episodes of Duncanville so far, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s cool to see shows get a little wacky and take some risks. And maybe there’s not much exploration of what could’ve been an interesting look at Annie’s sense of purposeless without her job, but there were plenty of fun gags with the birds, and sometimes that’s all you can ask for. In the grand scheme of things, I’d say this episode was definitely something to caw about.