Dirty Sexy Money: The Country House (1.8)

It's screamingly obvious that there's no direction in the Simon Elder storyline and that the writers are pulling the varying plot strands out of their butts. So much of the plot developments related to his arc felt right out of left-field in this episode, from his lengthy connection to the Darling's, to the weirdness about the previously-never-mentioned-unless-I'm-blanking "Kenneth Darling" and his mysterious assassination. All the actors are trying, but you can tell that they're also desperately searching for some kind of understanding of what is happening.

While the Karen/Leticia team-up promised last episode seemed promising, the execution here was lame. Karen suddenly became ridiculously passive as a character, while Leticia's "master plan" could never have conceivably worked anyway. Lisa's anger made sense, but I'm feeling so little of any emotion for Karen right now that the whole story doesn't really work. I remember reading that Natalie Zea had trouble finding Karen's "voice" during these episodes, and you can understand why. Nobody in this particular storyline has any believable motivation for what they're doing.

The subplots with Jeremy, Patrick and Brian were individually strong. Sofia Vergara is insanely underwhelming here, but Jeremy's attempts to woo her as a "poor person" were pretty charming. His interaction with Clark was equally fun. At the same time, Brian's custody battle isn't necessarily interesting, but his prayer to God for the mediator to accept his bribe was hilarious. Ellen's shooting of Patrick was also genius, especially Nick's panicked explanation to the media.

You can see the wheels coming off the show as a whole, and with hindsight you can practically hear the machinations being played which resulted in three whole episodes being abandoned. After such a strong opening, Dirty Sexy Money has now settled into one of those soap operas where only certain storylines work. Unfortunately, the bad storylines aren't just bad, here they're completely nonsensical. C+

Credits
Guest stars Sofia Vergara (Sofia Montoya); Bellamy Young (Ellen Darling); Sheryl Lee (Andrea Smithson); Tom Wright (Mr. Mitchell); Shawn Michael Patrick (Clark); Candis Cayne (Carmelita Rainer)
Writers Josh Reims, Nancy Won Director Michael Schultz