On Gordon and genre blindness.
As we all know, we're about a few years away from Mike acting hurt and betrayed because Gordon kept his pain at being smacked around by his folks to himself instead of blubbering like a nitwit on a damned sitcom. Brian tried reminding him that, hey, they live in the real world so no, he ain't gonna do that but Mikey, he would not be moved. He insisted that Gordon was somehow not playing by the rules because on television, he woulda talked.
Originally, I thought it was just Mike being a stupid idiot who thinks that he's the star of a sitcom. After all, most of why his life is worse than it ought to be is that the poor ignorant dolt thinks that the people around him are character types instead of real people like himself so we're looking at a sadsack making an idiot of himself again acting as if the studio audience were to hoot in derision if Elly does something dumb. My problem is that when Lynn stopped devoting her free time to bashing her family, she ran out of ideas and started watching a lot of old sitcoms; this means that Mike is almost right to behave as if he's in a sitcom because his life has become one. He's just wrong about how the main character is and who the antagonist jerk who makes her life worse out of sheer bloodyminded stupidity is. If he were to be made aware that he's Frank Burns to Elly's Hawkeye, he'd probably die of shock.
Originally, I thought it was just Mike being a stupid idiot who thinks that he's the star of a sitcom. After all, most of why his life is worse than it ought to be is that the poor ignorant dolt thinks that the people around him are character types instead of real people like himself so we're looking at a sadsack making an idiot of himself again acting as if the studio audience were to hoot in derision if Elly does something dumb. My problem is that when Lynn stopped devoting her free time to bashing her family, she ran out of ideas and started watching a lot of old sitcoms; this means that Mike is almost right to behave as if he's in a sitcom because his life has become one. He's just wrong about how the main character is and who the antagonist jerk who makes her life worse out of sheer bloodyminded stupidity is. If he were to be made aware that he's Frank Burns to Elly's Hawkeye, he'd probably die of shock.