The Four Best THE NEW ADVENTURES OF OLD CHRISTINE Episodes of Season Three

[TMC]

https://jacksonupperco.com/2025/01/1...-season-three/

Ordered as a mid-season replacement and then cut from 13 episodes to 10 amid the 2007 WGA Strike, Old Christine’s third season is the shortest of its entire run. By now, the central character has been broadened out a lot from her premised origins, so much so that she’s often just generically chaotic, sometimes even veering into the self-serving and less nice territory reminiscent of its star’s other roles; and as we’ve seen, this has weakened the show’s ability to utilize Christine in situation-satisfying plots. Three is a further slide, but not as aggressively as we saw in Two itself, as the year instead offers stories that, though increasingly bigger and maybe trite, still seek some entrenchment within the situation… and more frequently than before, from parts we would define as lower concept. That is, as the series continues to do more with the ensemble’s funniest players, Matthew and Barb, it also moves away from its high-concept wrinkle — the implied triangle, with Old Christine in direct opposition to New Christine — thereby allowing the two women and Richard to develop comedically outside of this constraining one-joke construct, which has only yielded rom-com clichés… Speaking of which, aside from two blah episodes extricating Christine from last year’s Mr. Harris, Three also takes on a new focus in the low-concept dating portion of its situation, zeroing in on the difficulties Christine faces not just as a divorced mom, but as one who’s middle-aged.