NBC’s The New Normal is a delightful show about a not very ordinary gay couple trying to have a surrogate daughter with a strange woman who has an oddball child and an unbelievably bigoted (and funny) grandmother. NeNe Leakes is also somehow involved. As much as it would like us to believe that this is the way the world works today, like most Ryan Murphy shows it is a celebration of the oddities within all of us. Therefore this weekly feature is both a celebration (and indictment) of all the abnormality contained within it.
Normal: Wanting to have the perfect wedding. Abnormal: Rich homosexuals obsessed with style and design thinking they can have the perfect wedding in their own home. That only happens on TV.
Normal: Wanting a priest to officiate your wedding. Abnormal: Being gay and thinking that a priest will actually marry you.
Normal: Jeff Dunham jokes. Abnormal: Gays don’t make Jeff Dunham jokes, they make Lena Dunham jokes.
Normal: Hating your mother. Abnormal: Hating your mother and then having her show up on your wedding day without explaining why you’re getting along all of the sudden.
Normal: Mothers schooling their daughters about their love life. Abnormal: Daughters knowing more about their mother’s love lives than their mothers do.
RELATED: New Normal Recap: John Stamos Is Addicted to Love
Normal: Your mother and father hating each other after they get divorced. Abnormal: Your mother and father hating each other after they get divorced, then having sex together at Thanksgiving, then hating each other, and then inexplicably agreeing to drive to a wedding together but then your mom showing up alone and making horrible jokes about your father.
Normal: Your mom making inappropriate jokes. Abnormal: Your mom making inappropriate penis jokes.
Normal: Coming to love gay marriage. Abnormal: The awful horrible racist homophobic grandmother suddenly supporting gay marriage for no reason at all.
Normal: Wanting John Stamos at your wedding. Abnormal: Having him actually show up.
RELATED: New Normal Recap: Grey Gardens Edition
Normal: Your mothers showing up with unreasonable demands on your wedding. Abnormal: This is entirely normal.
Normal: Making sex jokes at a wedding. Abnormal: Wishing two gay guys “bottomless ecstasy.” It just doesn’t work that way.
Normal: Gay men having good taste in clothing. Abnormal: Mauve! Again?!
Normal: Drama at your wedding. Abnormal: Someone’s water breaking at your wedding. This only happens on TV.
Normal: Leaving a wedding early. Abnormal: Usually it’s because the chicken is rubbery and there’s a cash bar, not because the couple is having a baby, and neither of the couple is pregnant.
RELATED: New Normal Recap: Baby Clothes Edition
Normal: Checking everyone’s schedule before setting your wedding day. Abnormal: Setting your wedding day within weeks of when a surrogate is going to have your child. Don’t people plan these things far in advance?
Normal: Taking your father’s last name. Abnormal: Taking one father’s last name when you have two.
Normal: Gays naming their baby Sawyer. It just seems very apt.
Normal: A character on a Ryan Murphy show totally reversing her character with little to no explanation, like Ellen Barkin did. Abnormal: Getting emotionally welled up when she does.
Normal: Getting married on the beach. Abnormal: Running around stealing people’s surfboards and beach balls to decorate your spur of the moment beach wedding with two babies and neither of them cries or needs attention at all while you’re throwing it together.
Normal: Crying at weddings. Abnormal: God, why am I crying at this wedding!
Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter @BrianJMoylan
[Photo Credit: NBC]
From Our Partners
See ‘Game of Thrones’ as ‘Mad Men’ (Vulture)
Hayden Panetierre Bikinis in Miami (Celebuzz)
