‘The Mick’s’ Mickey & Alba Are the Best Comedy Duo Since Lucy & Ethel

When it comes to comedy dynamic duos, it’s hard to argue that anyone has earned more laughs-per-minute than I Love Lucy’s Lucy and Ethel. It’s been over 60 years since Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance squared off against a conveyor belt, aggressively stuffing their faces with chocolates, and their antics still hold up as hilarious today.

That’s partly because Lucy and Ethel perfected the lunatic/straight-man dynamic, putting a kind of comedy in front of the cameras that has never gone out of style. One charismatic schemer gets a cuckoo idea, one naysayer says “nay,” and hijinks ensue when the former drags the latter along for the ride. That sitcom setup has never fallen out of fashion and it is alive and thrashing today in the form of Mickey and Alba on Fox’s The Mick.

Kaitlin Olson and Carla Jimenez are unstoppable together, every bit the perfect comedy duo as Lucy and Ethel. Burnout degenerate Mickey (Olson) plots to stay one step ahead of the equally amoral kids in her care, and housekeeper-turned-partner-in-crime Alba (Jimenez) is the wildcard up her sleeve. The Mick is already a powder keg of bad intentions, and any combination of the six characters can be delightfully volatile. But when Mickey and Alba get together, the show truly explodes.

The show knows this, as the evolution of Mickey and Alba’s relationship has been the best part of the show’s raucous first two seasons (all on Hulu, by the way!). When Mickey first disrupted the stuffy Pemberton household, Alba was merely the emotionally abused help, ignored and underestimated by the kids. Mickey didn’t buy into all that and immediately nixed the gross master/servant relationship. From there, Alba became a real member of the family–well, Mickey’s family, which meant playing hard, living fast, and wrecking everything.

This is when Mickey and Alba’s dynamic truly became legendary-esque. Once Alba’s status within the household was elevated to Mickey’s low level, the two became BFFs and partners in surviving family life. And on The Mick, family life involves arson, drifters, cons, run-ins with the law, and a surprising amount of dismemberment. With problems like those, Mickey and Alba regularly get into italicized-for-emphasis–predicaments.

Just like Lucy and Ethel, Mickey and Alba get into trouble on the reg. In Season 2 alone, they’ve trashed an invention fair, feuded with Jennie Garth’s child, snuck a pee-stained mattress out of a kid’s house to curb sleepover trauma, staged a police raid to scare an elementary schooler, and set a college admissions worker on fire. Mickey and Alba are one of TV’s best comedy duos because when they get together, you literally have no idea what they could do/damage/destroy.

This combustible chemistry is best on display in the instant-classic episode “The Dump.” Mickey and Alba chaperone an elementary school field trip to the dump and come back with one extra kid. Things escalate wildly as Mickey and Alba’s try to figure out what to do with the kid. The pair shoot ideas back and forth about what to do (there is a difference between talking to the cops and calling the cops), and also what to call the silent kid (“Dump” wins out over “Ignacio”). Phones are broken, minorities are offended, and a junkyard dog gets a taste for human flesh. In the end, Dump is left in the dump for the cops to find, and Mickey and Alba do another tour of duty as chaperones for a field trip to a mustard factory (Mickey notes, “Honestly, that school needs to fully reimagine its entire field trip program”).

“The Dump” is a tour de force because Mickey and Alba’s frantic friendship is front and center. While Alba initially started out as the wide-eyed Ethel to Mickey’s bad-influence-Lucy, “The Dump” (and much of Season 2) finds them on equal ground. Both Mickey and Alba are equally likely to suggest something ridiculous, like Alba busting out what she thinks is her “cool white lady” voice (it’s really the opposite of all those words). They’re both the Lucy and both the Ethel, which causes the time-tested dynamic to do doughnuts and makes the show wildly unpredictable. It’s a dangerous spin on an old favorite.

This variation on the Lucy and Ethel formula works because Olson and Jimenez can play all of the planning and panic at lightning speed. They’re totally in sync with each other and while they’re always coming from a different POV (Mickey’s a grifter and Alba’s revealed herself to be kind of a brawler), they truly do perform all of their scenes as one–just like Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance did. Mickey and Alba bring out the worst in each other, and that’s the best part of The Mick.

Where to stream The Mick