Review: Mike Tyson Mysteries “Shop til You Drop”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The gang visits the grocery store. While Mike’s illustrated shopping list leaves much to be desired, it’s a good thing they only need the basics. Pigeon doesn’t like that they’ve strapped him into a cart, because it’s demeaning. But that’s the least of their worries after a woman is found dead in aisle three.

Believing the “murderer” is in the store, Mike orders everyone to meet in the meat department. The only workers on duty—and hence the primary suspects—are the butcher, the produce guy, the manager, and a cashier named Gina. When Mike discovers the dead lady was a secret shopper, the workers turn on each other, each believing their fellow employees resorted to murder out of fear of receiving a bad grade for their department.

Instead of discussing things calmly, they murder each other—after all the men confess to having an affair with Gina. With everybody dead except for the mystery team, the case is sort of closed. Although, it turns out the secret shopper wasn’t really dead, she’d simply fallen, cut her head, and lost consciousness. She was also only there to shop, not to grade the store. That was an old list meant for a different location.

The episode ends as it began, with an omnipotent narrator reciting a poem that showers the mystery team in the highest of praise. Oh, and the team accidentally leaves Pigeon at the murder store, strapped in the cart, because he’s small and easy to forget.

Our Take

This episode was extremely average. While it embraced the weirdness like your typical MTM outing, it lacked the legs to really take off. To begin with, this mystery didn’t come from a note tied to a pigeon, and so we didn’t get to hear how each member of the troupe felt about the case’s parameters beforehand. Sure, the team has been thrown head-first into mysteries before, but even the most abstract shows benefit from having a basic structure.

Just like that, Pigeon is no longer Yung Hee’s birth father. I was kidding myself last week when I mistook a rare kind gesture as love and affection for his secret daughter. This show isn’t going to tuck into continuity this late in the game, and anybody who even considered the idea should immediately be drawn and quartered. Next time, I’ll stick with my initial gut instinct, because that was spot on.

About midway through the episode, Mike made a joke about talking too much, before chugging an entire bottle of vinegar. Before he said that, I was wondering why he had so many lines this week. Did Jim Rash, Norm MacDonald, and Rachel Ramras all go on holiday at once? Oh shoot, did they all go somewhere together and forget to invite Mike? I hope not, because the show is infinitely better when the side characters are given more to do.