Uncommon Jay: The Chicken Man Cometh

Welcome to your reprieve from the rest of the week, the desolate wasteland I have started to refer to as the MoJayve desert. But I’ve got some bad news, this ep is extremely light on Jay. Much like the light American beer served at the man’s former day job (football games), it’s all froth and filler, mainly concerned with the so-called “real” premise of the show, Kristin’s store and the people who work there.

Every man besides Jay Cutler continues to be a bozo—Honestly, is there some kind of age regression that dudes automatically undergo once they enter the Nashville city limits?—and Kristin shows she is a tough but fair boss when it comes to drinking her employees under the table. Like the structure of a true Shakespearean tragedy, Cutler doesn’t make an appearance until the ‘morrow of the first (spring-break style) night. I pray thee bear with me.

1st Down

The first glimpse we get of Jay is through a fuzzy FaceTime feed when Kristin calls him hungover from Florida, the morning after the first night of her Uncommon James staff retreat. Kristin Cavallari is fun as hell, don’t get me wrong, and seeing her ripping shots and telling her hot and rich employees how to get their shit together certainly brings back fond memories of the way she terrorized Laguna Beach, but we are only here for one thing! And it’s a six-foot-something man with Matthew McConaughey-if-he-had-narcolepsy eyes: Jay Cutler.

So here’s Jay like a burst of spring air with static shot through it, comforting his wife and her very bad hangover with tender pet names like “man.” She asks where the children are and Jay digs deep in his consciousness to tally them, “One’s at school. One’s sleeping. I don’t know where the other one is at.”

“When you find the other one, will you call me?” She asks.

Jay demurs, “Uh. I don’t know if it’s really good for them to see you like this.”

Kristin laughs, which truly is the only response to that statement.

“Aren’t you guys going on a boat or something?” Jay asks, proving that however many states away, he still loves a good itinerary.

2nd Down

Kristin heads home early and that means just when you thought it’d be another amorous FaceTime filling the Cutler quota, we get Jay in the flesh, stepping out in shorts and matching trainers for a welcome home dog walk.

Kristin tells Jay she had “maybe too much fun” and he seems almost… scared?

“What does too much fun mean?” He asks tentatively.

“I drank way too much.” Kristin says. Jay cracks up with palpable relief. “I literally thought I was twenty-one again—”

“You’re not,” Jay interjects. He knows his stuff.

They make it to their mailbox which from what I can tell is about a three mile walk down the driveway.

Jay perks up, “Anything good?”

Kristin rifles through the mail, “Some deer hunting thing.”

“Boom!” Jay lifts up his arm halfway, like he can’t quite decide if he wants to reach out for his mail or pump a fist in victory. Maybe overwhelmed, he doesn’t take the package. They start back up the half-marathon course to the house. Jay tells Kristin he wants to take her on a “day date out to old Bloomsbury Farms” to get, you guessed it, chickens. (JK, probably you were guessing goats).

3rd Down

Ah yes, “old Bloomsbury Farms." A rolling vista of green pastures where we get to see star quarterback Jay Cutler put his scrimmage moves to the test, chasing and catching chickens.

He sort of sucks at it. But to be fair, it’s probably easier to show flashes of agility around 300-pound men in a big open field than against a lightning-quick hen in a tiny pen, hellbent on getting away from a guy whose center of gravity seems to be in his head, permanently held snugly in place by one hat or another.

The farmer catches the chicken for them and Jay tentatively steps toward it, petting its silky black feathers and feeling newly inspired to go to the hen house and rapidly rustle the straw as if it will attract the birds toward him, like a marine biologist might call for a dolphin. It doesn’t work. Still, Cutler wants no less than ten chickens. He will have them.

4th Down

Look, I’m sorry, but there was so little Cut-con this week that we have to resort to scenes from the next episode to fulfill the structure of this column.

The good news is, it looks like Jay sets fire to a tea towel very early on and channels a young Kurt Russel in Backdraft for the ease and nonchalance with which he extinguishes it. We are also going to get dinner party Jay—a great Jay to be sure—and the grand opening of Uncommon Jay, I mean Uncommon James, where retail Cutler will certainly make an entrance. There might even be goats.