Happy Endings' Hibernation Episode Is All the Proof We Need That It Was Canceled Too Soon

Name any TV show that has been canceled and you'll find fans who say that show could — nay, should! — have lasted for several more seasons. In most cases, it's a combination of wishful thinking and unbridled enthusiasm. In the case of Happy Endings, the ABC hangout sitcom that ran for three all-too-brief seasons from 2011 to 2013, it's almost certainly true. No episode better proved that than "The Butterfly Effect Effect," a.k.a. "Spring Smackdown," which first aired 12 years ago on February 22, 2012. The episode is a testament to the show's gift for observation, character continuity, and the cast's intuitive chemistry with one another. It's also the episode where Max becomes a bear.

The premise of "The Butterfly Effect Effect" is as baseline sitcom as it gets: Dave (Zachary Knighton), Alex (Elisha Cuthbert), and Penny (Casey Wilson) are eagerly anticipating Brad (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Jane's (Eliza Coupe) annual blow-up, a fight that has become a tradition like Groundhog Day. Like the groundhog’s appearance on February 2, Brad and Jane's fight is a reliable indicator that spring is on its way.

The tables are turned, however, when it's revealed that Jane and Brad are wise to the others egging them on and stage a fake fight, because they know the group needs their bellwether for spring. And then the tables are flipped again when Brad and Jane have a real fight. Situation, complication, turn, and resolution, bing-bang-boom. It's what creator David Caspe and writers Jonathan Groff and Sierra Teller Ornelas do with their premise that proved Happy Endings was delivering something more strange and creative than the rest of network TV comedy.

In 2012, ABC's comedy landscape was heavily influenced by the success of Modern Family, which anchored a family sitcom night on Wednesdays — including The Middle and Suburgatory — where Happy Endings was the ill-fitting 9:30 PM appendage. The alternative was ABC's Tuesday night lineup, which had been taken over by a bunch of battle-of-the-sexes freshman comedies like Man Up! and the Tim Allen-starring Last Man Standing, among which Happy Endings would have been an even worse fit. This was an era of mockumentaries (Modern Family, The Office, and Parks and Recreation all employed that framing device), where the closest comparison to Happy Endings was How I Met Your Mother, which by 2012 was in its 7th season and had followed the Friends path from hangout show to relationship show.

By its second season, Happy Endings had taken its place alongside the recently premiered New Girl as TV's best hangout comedies. Once Happy Endings powered past the clunkiness of its Alex-left-Dave-at-the-altar pilot, each character was able to grow into their own niche: Dave the hapless trendster with a food truck and the deepest of V-neck t-shirts; Alex the lovable dumb-dumb; lovelorn but enthusiastic Penny; Type-A Jane and wife-guy Brad; and of course Max (Adam Pally), un-fabulously gay and loving it.

Caspe and his staff of writers did a good job of spreading the fun around, so that each character got their moment to go off the rails from episode to episode (the one where Penny can speak Italian while drunk; the one where Jane meets the Car Czar), and "The Butterfly Effect Effect" was a showcase for Max to get weird. Specifically, by acting like a bear.

What makes the conceit that Max is acting like a bear even more impressive is that it's an outgrowth of some keenly rendered observational comedy. It's late February in Chicago, that time of year when bitter cold (eight degrees!) meets deep frustration that spring still seems so far away. The gang is reduced to playing baseball inside Dave and Max's loft apartment. Only those who have lived through the long winter in an upper-Midwest city can understand this particular kind of stir-craziness. You feel like you've been hibernating for months. And who else hibernates like that but bears?

Max is already a bear in the gay parlance, so why not complete the transformation? Pally plays the unshaven, perma-slumbering Max like a preverbal, lumbering beast. He eats honey in giant handfuls out of a jar. He paws at giant slabs of meat that are hanging from the ceiling?!). He rides a unicycle and wears a Garrett’s popcorn tin on his head like a fez. He crawls headfirst into the garbage bin to get at a piece of cake that Dave foolishly forgot to seal inside a ziploc bag. The degree of commitment and physical performance that Pally puts into his Max-as-a-bear scenes is unreal. The fact that the rest of the cast reacts to this as just another phase of Max's annual cycle makes it even funnier.

This kind of reality-stretching comedic swing is a perfect illustration of how much potential Happy Endings had for a long run. This was a show that had nailed its characters so perfectly by mid-Season 2 (and after a short first season, no less) that they were able to experiment without violating what was essentially true about said characters. Max going full Winnie the Pooh as a reaction to the winter doldrums is a leap, but it's strangely consistent with everything we know about lovable, slothful Max. This is the kind of whimsical writing that stays true to character that shows like 30 Rock and Seinfeld were able to pull off, and that's good company to be in.

30 Rock and Seinfeld also got much more than two-and-a-half seasons to be able to stretch that creativity. After ABC moved Happy Endings to a new time slot for Season 3, ratings fell, and the show was burned off two episodes at a time on Friday nights, an undignified end to one of the best comedies of the 2010s. It's not just that Happy Endings had the potential to be great comedy, that potential was already being realized. How many more Max hibernation cycles might we have gotten had the show continued?

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.