“It’s like hearing Prince Charming dry-humped Sleeping beauty before he kissed her.” – Steve
I’ve totally been Running Wilde missing it… and all its hilarity.
No. That’s actually a steaming shovel of lies that I’m forcing down your gullet. I was actually enjoying my time away from Steve Wilde and Emmy Kadubic and their “chemistry.” I lost a little weight. My hair seemed thicker. I was a new man. But all good things have to come to an end, so let’s just get this over with.
Steve has been spending some time trying to use an Inception-like series of subliminal message drops to woo Emmy, but she quickly catches on. She attests to her love of Andy and explains that she hasn’t married him yet simply because they cannot afford a wedding. Steve offers to throw the wedding right on his property (which is apparently on Long Island — I had assumed California) and Emmy gratefully accepts.
The twist (for lack of a better term) is that both are playing a game of chicken. Steve thinks by actually forcing Emmy to go through with all of the wedding plans, she’ll realize that she really doesn’t have feelings for Andy and will come running to Steve. Emmy, on the other hand, isn’t ready to marry Andy, but is willing to go through with the charade to prove to Steve that she knows what he’s up to. Or something. I don’t know.
Look, this “wedding chicken” subplot could have worked if it had been but a brief part of the episode. It’s a vaguely amusing premise if it existed in any kind of brevity. Instead it was stretched out over half of the episode. And then the chicken opponents were changed from Steve and Emmy to Steve and Andy. And let me tell ya, things didn’t get much better.
The wedding becomes exceedingly lavish and transforms into something of a renaissance faire — with the general public soon invited and tickets being charged at the door. The Steve-Andy rivalry fittingly incorporates the medieval theme and they joust, A Knight’s Tale-style (the best style of jousting…sorry American Gladiators). But unlike in the middling Heath Ledger Middle Aged action-drama full of purposely anachronistic music (and Paul Bettany’s naked ass) of the early 2000s, no actual jousting occurs. Instead, Steve bails (just like a real game of chicken!) and Andy ends up riding his horse to Canada where he is stopped and accused of being a terrorist.
If there was one thing that saved “Best Man” (and it really didn’t, but let’s get hypothetical all up in this mother) it was Peter Serafinowicz’s medieval lute songs which, while not funny, were at least kind of cute. At the very least it reminded me of one of Serafinowicz’s past music-related ventures: his direction of the Hot Chip video for “I Feel Better.” And while I don’t really like the song (or Hot Chip in general to be honest — I saw them open for LCD Soundsystem a couple weeks ago and there was way too much synthesizer and falsetto for my tastes), the video is wonderfully odd. So you should watch it instead of thinking about Running Wilde. You’ll be far more entertained.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.