Over the years, a slew of American TV imports have tried to recapture the fame of their British predecessors and completely botched the narrative translation. That definitely can’t be said about HBO’s comedy series Getting On, a show with a sense of humor drier than the skin of many of its cast members. And that left-of-center humor is sitting front and center in this exclusive Season 2 deleted scene from the Getting On: The Complete Second Season's Blu-ray and DVD release.
I know you’re thinking the same thing I’m thinking: boy, I’d really love to win $700 in some way at this moment. And then you’re thinking: how does a gag this good get left on the cutting room floor? Though Getting On isn’t a show with plot mechanics moving at a mile-a-minute pace, it’s also not one that wastes any time, and the quiet moments inform these characters just as much as the ones where everything is going crazy. But I still think this scene could have been shoehorned in somewhere.
To be fair, though, Laurie Metcalf’s Dr. Jenna James took quite a bit of bashing during the first two seasons of this show, especially near the end when – spoiler alert – all of her not-that-legal practices within the Mount Palms Memorial Hospital’s Billy Barnes Extended Care Unit are discovered, and she puts everyone in some very official headlights. Maybe the creative team felt Dr. James was already going to be viewed as harshly as possible by the end of the season by both viewers and the characters, so they didn’t so much need to let everyone know that she is a person who also bets on how many people are going to die in a given year.
I mean, maybe someone could have used her superior reasoning/guessing skills in another way for their benefit, rather than just judging her. There is power in reasoning/guessing!
In the moment where James is caught for taking part in that bet, Metcalf delivers a boiled-down version of everything I like about this character. She carelessly lies and agrees that it’s a hideous thing to do, making all the faces one expects from another person who is horrified at the thought of something, and then she has to come up with a big lie to cover for her own indulgent actions. This is not a person to champion on a regular basis.
Getting On: The Complete Second Season hits Blu-ray/DVD shelves and Amazon today, on Tuesday, November 3. Season 3 of Getting On, which will be its last, starts up on HBO on Sunday, November 8, at 10:00 p.m. ET after a new episode of The Leftovers.
