2 Broke Girls Season 1-09 ‘And The Really Petty Cash’ Recap

Max (Kat Dennings) and Johnny’s (Nick Zano) relationship has come to a head. After Johnny painted a picture of him and Max kissing on a giant billboard near Max’s apartment things seemed to be heading in a very romantic direction. However, Johnny has a girlfriend, Cash (Kelly Beckett), and when the events in “And the Very Petty Cash” reveal the depth of Johnny and Cash’s relationship (“Johnny-Cash, they’re an institution”), Max comes to definitive conclusion. This is a solid plot and the execution is at times very funny. After Johnny stops by the apartment unexpectedly the two share yet another kiss that nearly leads to something more.

“I’m lucky all we did was kiss; my pants kept saying ‘take me off’ and I was like ‘no pants.”

This confession from Max to Caroline (Beth Behrs) is one of those moments on 2 Broke Girls that I find irresistible. Moments like this show the fun potential of this series, the potential that this series continually squanders by forcing in the diner setting and the stupid horse. The Max and Johnny story is the best bit of storytelling that 2 Broke Girls has offered in its short time on the air.

While I won’t miss Johnny now that he’s back with his girlfriend and Max has finally ‘flipped her switch’ and taken to the bed, he was a welcome presence; mostly because many of his scenes happened away from the awful diner set. I’m happy with anything that gets 2 Broke Girls away from the diner. One cannot express enough how terrible 2 Broke Girls is when it indulges the idiotic stereotypes played by Matthew Moy and Jonathan Kite. That’s probably why I enjoyed the museum scenes in “And the Very Petty Cash.” Caroline sent out an email blast about the cupcake business and landed a gig at a hipster museum.

Unfortunately, the person responsible for hiring them is Cash, Johnny’s girlfriend. The girls can’t just leave; they’re getting $500 to circulate their cupcakes. The only thing that didn’t work about the museum story was the ending. I get that Caroline has an odd streak and that years of being rich has left her with a residual inability to understand the value of money, but Caroline giving up the money they suffered for in order to buy Johnny’s painting just so Max can kick a hole in in it was a dumb ending.

Wasting money in this way flies in the face of the premise of the show; 2 broke girls saving money to open their own cupcake business. Not that realism or believability matters—I’m pretty sure we will find ourselves at this cupcake shop at some point in the show’s future—but don’t simply violate the premise for something this dumb.

Random notes:

• For the first time in the show’s run there was a scene featuring neither Caroline nor Max. This was a bad idea. Nothing against Garrett Morris, who could be funny if used correctly, but any scene without Max or Caroline is a bad scene on 2 Broke Girls and there are already far too many bad scenes with Caroline and or Max.
• Not a single rape joke this week.
• After the first two episodes we talked about the unspoken romance between Max and Caroline. I made a conscious effort to avoid the topic since the second episode because there is an element of pervy wishful thinking involved. This week however, the topic is unavoidable. Once again Max alluded to a past in which she may have done some ‘experimenting,’ The girls then woke up in bed together, fully clothed, leading to another few jokes about their relationship.
• Fact, if Max and Caroline were men, the gay dynamic of the relationship would be all that anyone would talk about. That said, I still feel a little skeevy writing about a topic that is undoubtedly the subject of much slash fiction.