In some ways the show operates like Chinatown or Sixth Sense where one makes an assumption in the beginning that then colors all the following scenes. Then, once we learn the truth, we can look back and see how everyone's motivations make more sense, such as the things Tilly did when Chip requested them, and how Chip stayed in a high rent building without actually making or selling anything (at present).
It wouldn't surprise me if regular people thought that there was too much recovery stuff, and recovery people thought that there was too little recovery stuff.
That first scene with McLovin was spot on. Hearing "how much time do you have" is right up there with "we need to talk" in terms of knowing what is coming next. They could have easily catered to the recovery crowd with a dozen or so more standard program phrases, such as "when it come to dating in AA, the odds are often good, but the goods are often odd." Ditto with all the common Freudian slips such as "admitting that my wife was unmanagable, sought through prayer and medication, when we were wronged we promptly admitted it" etc.
One morning I was sort of dozing through the opening preamble but perked up when I swore that I heard someone misread the "A.A. is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution" statement as "AA is not allied with any sexual domination, ..." I looked across the room at Kelly A. who was giving me the "did we just hear that?" look back, yet no one else out of the other hundred people there was responding as we were. Perhaps they were in an even deeper early morning coma than moi. It is a hard call as to how well inside humor translates to the outside world. I still think that Norm's statement in Cheers of "every day I come into this bar, sit on this stool, drink beer, and try to figure out why my marriage isn't working" is the purest form of alcohological thinking lifted from a meeting room. There were many other lines whose source was similarly obvious.
I think my percentage of Chimp DNA is higher than others. Cleaver Greene
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