Impastor is Back!
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Season one ended with a cliffhanger and the new season, which began tonight, picks up from there and ends with another cliffhanger. Wow.
In case you have not seen it, this show is brilliant. A low-life sleaze on the run from gambling debts takes over the identity of a man about to take a new job as a church pastor in a small town broad-minded enough (so to speak, no pun intended) to welcome an openly gay pastor.
Our sleazeball (Michael Rosenbaum, who played Lex Luthor on Smallville) is a horndog pursued by hilariously incompetent cops and various unfortunate enforcers for a determined loan shark as well as a flamboyantly gay man in his new congregation while trying to conceal his non-gayness and keep his job, even though he knows literally nothing about the Bible, not even what one looks like.
He manages to survive one near catastrophe after another in his church duties, pastoral counseling, and Sunday sermons, all by the skin of his teeth and massive good luck. He's like the guy in silent comedies who accidentally ducks just in time to miss getting a pie in the face.
The TV genre known as the "sitcom" got that label because originally the humor arose out of the situation and the characters, not a bunch of setups for carefully crafted one-liners Oscar W. would have envied. In this case, there are no "gotcha" insults a la Golden Girls, no verbal zingers, just outrageous situations with clever plot twists for our scandalous slacker to maneuver his way through as he somehow triumphs in marriage counseling, teenage guidance, and managing to get laid regularly, secretly, and without scandal.
Check out the entire first season for some quality binge watching and then dig into the exciting start of the second round mildly salacious humor. Somehow this show sneaked in under the radar last year, but if enough people like it and talk it up, it just might keep up enough audience for its quirky niche to be happily and perversely occupied for years.