Happy Endings Isn’t Friends, Thank God  What you're watching.
Oct. 23 2012 10:10 AM  Friends 4-Ever  Happy Endings escapes the
tidy patterns of young-urban-buddies sitcoms.  Damon Wayans Jr.
and Eliza Coupe in the Season 3 premiere of Happy Endings
Photograph by Adam Taylor/ABC.  I’m glad ABC is developing good
sitcoms, but do they have to have such bad titles?
There's Suburgatory, which debuted last fall and answers to that
must-stumble portmanteau, and there's Happy Endings (ABC,
Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET), which debuted earlier in 2011 as a
midseason replacement. The jejune bodily fluid humor, the
discouraging synonymy with a 2005 Lisa Kudrow film, and above
all the dreary optimism: All these my ears heard as turn-offs. 
Nor did the basic premise—six best friends in Chicago live and
love and slack around and yup it up—excite my eyes at a
superficial glance. But in fact Happy Endings displays an
invigorating antipathy to the Central Perkiness of young urban
laughfests. The gang of six here—a web of spouses, s