What’s Worth Watching: Mom’s Intimacy Issues

Mom, “Turkey Meatballs and a Getaway Car” (Thursday, Feb. 26, 9:30/8:30c, CBS)

On Mom, you never know when the rocky road of sobriety will take a raunchy and often hilarious detour. And so it goes as the sitcom moves to a new, later time period, finding Christy (Anna Faris) being forced to confront her issues of honesty and intimacy with her sex partners—most recently, with sad sack Gabriel (Nate Corddry), newly separated from his wealthy wife, who inconveniently happens to be Christy’s boss. Their furtive encounters qualify as “danger sex” because Christy gets more turned on the higher the risk of them being caught. When her sponsor Marjorie (Mimi Kennedy) challenges her to “let your true self be seen,” Christy’s response is typical Mom, poignant yet funny: “I have a true self?”

While Christy deals with the realization that “the longer you don’t drink, the more you see who you really are and why you do stuff,” Marjorie also meddles with Christy’s fellow-addict mom Bonnie (Allison Janney), who’s in danger of relapsing after the recent death of her ex-husband. Cornered into taking over as secretary of the women’s support group, the dictatorial Bonnie proves more than up to the challenge, demonstrating that sometimes the cure is almost as bad as the disease.