Family Secrets

This week, Raising Hope ran back-to-back new episodes. Now that was a little early Halloween treat. The second one, "Family Secrets," has the by-now-signature stamp of expertly spun wry humor mixed with the spot on pathos of a loving, if dyfunctional family. Creator Greg Garcia has given us a gem in this warm-hearted series.

A box arrives at the Chance home; in it are mementos and hilariously funny videos that Hope's mother, a recently executed murderer (you have to watch the series to see why this is funny), played with crazy abandon by Bijou Phillips. Jimmy wants to keep the box, mementos, and videos to show Hope later. Virginia thinks the whole lot should be burned. She tells Jimmy, "Your a parent now, you have to lie," which gets Jimmy thinking, "What are you lying to me about?"

He then decides to try and expose every secret he can. He gets mixes results; sometimes the lie is as silly as Virginia telling a young Jimmy not to pick his butt because there is a worm down there that will bite your finger off. Another, far more reaching lie, or as Virginia says, "Um, that one may have gotten a little out of hand," was that for years, Jimmy didn't eat any fruit because Virginia told him he was allergic. Apparently, he ate more than his fair share of fruit when he was young.

But Jimmy knows there is more. He tries to enlist his unwilling and uncomfortable ("It's my own private hell!" he mutters) dad to spill the beans and Jimmy stumbles on the "missing link" in the family tree. What happened to Virginia's mother? He is determined to find out.

Through a series of events and more lies and confusion, and with the help of his secret love, Sabrina, Jimmy finds out. It turns out that his Grandma isn't dead, as Virginia had told him. Nope, she is alive and well, living near by.

Jimmy is chagrined again - lied to again - and he and Sabrina rush over to his grandmother's house to meet her. He is curious as to why she is so close, but he's never met her. What he gets when she opens the door stuns him. She is an openly selfish and self-absorbed woman who actually wanted to give Virginia up for adoption.

Maw Maw wouldn't let her and raised Virginia herself, which was perfectly fine with her cold mother. But Maw Maw couldn't bear to tell Virginia that her mother abandoned her. Instead, she told her that she was killed by a combination of a plastic bag, a beehive, and a stone duck. You have to know Maw Maw to get that one.

All of a sudden, he realized his mom didn't lie - she had been lied to herself. But the real gist of the story is Jimmy figuring out that sometimes not telling someone the whole truth IS the best thing.

The episode closes with Jimmy showing the family his edited version of the tapes Hope's mother had sent, how he carefully made it into something sweet and lovely, leaving harsh reality far behind.