Selfie 1.04: "Nugget of Wisdom"

“No, I imagine they’d be quite ugly, sir. Red-headed Koreans. It’s not a good look. Typically.”
-Henry

“Nugget of Wisdom” was a pretty entertaining episode of “Selfie.” I liked that we saw a little more emphasis on Henry’s faults in addition to Eliza’s in this episode. Henry is trying to not work for a weekend, and he most definitely goes through workaholic withdrawal. I can be a bit of a workaholic myself, so I could identify with it. It’s another episode where Eliza and Henry each had a challenge to complete. Eliza had to do something compassionate with her weekend, and Henry had to not do anything with his. Surprisingly, Eliza ends up kind of crushing the challenge, although she does so with a little help from Henry. Henry ends up solving a work problem with a little help from Eliza, so I guess in the end it all evened out.

Eliza is doing well with trying to be a better person and always saying “thank you,” but the change is very tiring for her. She really, really wants weekends off from being nice. Henry quotes the song “Working for the Weekend” and says that the weekend is when people really work hard. Some coworkers point out the fact that the meaning of the song is that people work really had all week to enjoy the weekend, but Henry doesn’t really pay attention to that. That’s when Eliza and Henry make the deal that I mentioned in the introduction. Eliza will do something nice and charitable over the weekend if Henry does no work at all.

Eliza asks Charmonique for advice on charitable activities for the weekend, and Charmonique mentions that she’s planning to go to her high school reunion. She’s super excited, because it will be a chance to reunite with McMoney, her kind of douchey high school sweetheart. We get a pretty great flashback to one of Charmonique’s high school dances in 1994. I’m a 90’s kid, so I appreciate this sort of thing. Eliza agrees to stop by Charmonique’s place before the reunion to help her get ready. Charmonique thinks McMoney is her soulmate, and she is really looking forward to reconnecting with him. Henry isn’t having such good luck with his challenge. A rival coworker threatens to get the company’s orange chewable vitamin taken off the market. This vitamin is Henry’s baby, because it was his and Saperstein’s first big rebranding project. He can’t possibly let it go away.

Eliza goes to Charmonique’s to help her get ready for the reunion, and they spend most of the time in Charmonique’s creepy climate-controlled wig closet, trying to pick out the exact right wig for the location. They settle on one that’s kind of T-boz-like (and they sing a few bars of “No Scrubs,” of course). While they’re having fun goofing off with wigs, Charmonique’s babysitter texts to say she has food poisoning and needs to cancel. Charmonique eventually guilts Eliza into babysitting, even though she really, really doesn’t want to.

As we all know, Eliza judges her self-worth by her followers on social media. Typically, she has far and away the most followers on any social media platform of all the people in her social circle. Her “best friend” Britt, however, is catching up to her on Instagram. Eliza had wanted to spend the weekend going to Instagram-worthy party after party to make sure she stayed on top, but now she’s stuck babysitting Kevin, Charmonique’s son. Eliza tells Kevin about her dilemma, and very wise for her age, he reminds her how easy it is to fake things on the internet.

Henry, meanwhile, is super bored at home, trying to fill his time with making a salad and not moping over the bottle of chewable kids’ vitamins (can I say how much I identify with Henry’s super lame weekend plans?). He checks his phone, sees a photo of Eliza, and is instantly alarmed. He rushes to Charmonique’s apartment, expecting to see that Eliza is throwing a party when she should be babysitting. Instead, he sees a party set-up, complete with Kevin as badass DJ, but Eliza is the only other person there. They’ve taken some Instagram photos that look like she’s at a club. Kevin switches up the music to some K-pop for Henry’s benefit, and Henry takes a little offense that Kevin thought he’d like it just because he’s Korean. But then Henry start’s dancing to it like crazy, and it’s hilarious. I often forget that John Cho really got his career started in comedy, and in this scene, I could see why that was such a successful path for him.

Meanwhile, at the reunion, Charmonique does indeed get to see McMoney again, but it’s not the sweet scene she had planned in her head. McMoney is now a priest, and he says he’s glad to see her again because he heard she’s an unwed mother, and he wants to help her turn her life away from sin (basically). Charmonique is hurt at first, but then she realizes that her life is pretty awesome, and if McMoney is going to be so judgey, she doesn’t need him. She just needs to love herself, and she goes out on the dance floor to celebrate.

Henry sticks around to help Eliza with Kevin, and everything is great until it’s time for Kevin to go to bed. He starts sobbing, and it’s the strangest sob I’ve ever heard. Eliza and Henry then realize they completely forgot about Henry’s elaborate bedtime routine. They blast through all of the steps, but Kevin is still crying. Then Eliza remembers that Charmonique told her about all the specific times of day Kevin likes to eat chicken nuggets. Especially important are the “bedtime nuggets.” Eliza offers Kevin his bedtime nuggets, and he perks right up. Eliza and Henry start wondering what would happen if you put vitamins in chicken nuggets.

The vitamins in chicken nuggets thing is sort of a red herring. That doesn’t end up being the final pitch. Eliza made a comment about how if they put vitamins in the chicken nuggets, kids might eat too many of them and overdose. This is what actually inspires the pitch that Henry and Eliza give at the next staff meeting. Henry talks about how trendy gummy vitamins have led to more kids getting sick because of overdoses. The classic, orange, chewable vitamin doesn’t come with that risk. He wants to change the marketing to a theme of safety. Sapperstein loves it and says that Henry and Eliza make a great power couple. Henry insists they aren’t together, but it’s starting to look like he wishes they were.