Welcome back to Teeny Bopper TV Breakdown! Today we recap Radio Free Roscoe, episode 11, “My Pal Pronto.”

The full first two minutes of the episode are about updating the greeting on an answering machine and how one answers a phone line shared by the entire household - oh, those were the days. This segues into another conversation about how strict Ray’s dad is, and that determines today’s RFR topic: When is it okay to say no to a parent? Time for storytime with Ray: with Robbie as his witness, at dinner last night he got an ultimatum to either shave his sideburns or not be in this year’s family photo at all (which does seem harsh). What’ll happen tonight when he’s by himself? All will be revealed in tomorrow’s My Pal Pronto segment.

As Ray tells it, during dinner, his dad steals the last piece of meatloaf out from under him (literally off his plate!) and then rubs it in by gushing about it to Ray’s mom, the cook (and also calls her “mother” - he’s definitely giving Mike Pence). Apparently by refusing to shave his sideburns, Ray set an example of selfishness, so now it’s every man for himself. As it usually does, Ray’s nervous energy leads to him making a joke, as he says to his dad, “If you try to take my dessert from me, I’m sending you to your room,” which only leads Ray to be sent to his room instead, with an admonishment to “think long and hard about what it means to belong to this family.”

It would be easier for the viewers and for Ray to fully dismiss Ray’s dad if the man was wholly robotic, but he shows small signs of being human: He brings Ray’s dessert up to Ray’s room for him, responds to Ray’s “what did you do to it?” question with an appropriate amount of sarcasm, and he and Ray continue what’s clearly an ongoing inside joke to see who can come up with the punniest “home run call.”

But then at one instance of Ray trying to assert himself (and maybe calling his dad the selfish one for making everyone adhere to his wishes), the man escalates so quickly to, “If you’re not happy abiding by the family rules, maybe you’d prefer to not be a member of this family and be a boarder in this house instead,” it’s almost whiplash-inducing. And Ray takes him up on it: He does have to pay for his own food, but won’t have to pay rent or follow any other rules. Time to see what freedom tastes like!

From Ray’s POV, we get a montage where it looks like he’s having the time of his life. But at RFR, Robbie notes that he’s worn the same shirt for days and Lily mentions he’s starting to smell. He also didn’t get Robbie’s call the night before because he doesn’t get access to the phone until he pays his portion of the bill. At this point, the others try to convince him to just do what his dad wants, but Ray’s having too much to fun to stop just yet.

Once Robbie and Lily are too busy to hang out because they’re spending time with their families, though, reality comes crashing in. Ray heads to the RFR studio late at night, where he inadvertently wakes up Travis, who was also there but attempting to sleep. Seems Travis’s parents don’t give him any rules, but more out of neglect than Mr. Brennan’s social experiment. The result is the same, though: neither kid is as empowered as he thought he might be.

Ray comes home to find his dad asleep at the kitchen table with a baseball game playing on the radio and asks, “You weren’t waiting up for me, were you?” His dad halfheartedly responds, “Why would I worry about a boarder?” but any aloofness doesn’t land. He offers Ray some mac and cheese (a welcome relief from the cake Ray’s been eating for days) and on the radio, a batter hits a home run, causing the father and son to high five and say, “Gone with the wind!”

Ray’s dad then says, “It seems silly we’ve spent so long fighting over sideburns,” which seems like a good start, until he says, “So what do you say I go downstairs and get my barber scissors?” So it’s still his way or the highway. Ray comes back with, “While you’re there, why don’t you grab a highchair and burp cloth while you’re at it?” Mr. Brennan says he just wants Ray to “look like a Brennan,” but Ray calls his dad out for not wanting him to grow up and thus not wanting him to make his own decisions, even about things like facial hair. He jokes about still having the mind of a ten-year-old, which oddly enough seems to make his dad feel better. Mr. Brennan then says when he was Ray’s age, he had the worst sideburns the planet had ever seen, which may also explain part of his stubbornness on this issue. He tells Ray he can keep the sideburns - but take a shower.

On the next RFR, though, the sideburns are gone! Maybe because it was Ray’s own choice as opposed to a decree from his father, maybe reverse psychology worked on him. But deep down, Ray still wants to be close to his dad. After all this sweetness, the rest of the gang can’t help but tease him that they wish he hadn’t shaved, though of course it’s all in good fun.

Don’t change that channel! We’ll be right back on Teeny Bopper TV Breakdown.

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