Portlandia, Season 5, Episode 1: Power Lunch with Toni and Candace

The Peeves: Origin stories, corporate culture, cocaine, pantsuits, feminism, yachts.

Put a Cap on It: Usually, the only characters who get backstories are those who'll generate millions in revenue—your Wolverines, your Darth Vaders, etc. In this season's Portlandia premiere, it's Toni (Carrie) and Candace (Fred), the bespectacled, confrontational owners of feminist bookstore Women and Women First.

A man writing for the Killingsworth Neighborhood News—not a real paper, nor the name of any real neighborhood—comes into the store for an interview. Candace and Toni sit him down and give him their life stories. Flash to 1991: The two are high-powered book executives in Manhattan, Candace at Crown Books and Toni at B. Dalton, in charge of "making sure there was a B. Dalton in every mall in America." Back then, they were all blazers and power lunches, willing to tear down anything in their path to literary domination.

When B. Dalton buys Crown, executive/cokehead Bruce Nathanson (the voice of Ghazan on The Legend of Korra) pits Candace and Toni against one another in a duel to oversee the newly-dubbed Cralton's chick-lit division. Candace wins the dance-off—set to to Snap!'s "The Power"—but learns Bruce is planning to give the division to a man anyway. So the two join forces, win the position and then, after Bruce badmouths Toni, set fire to his yacht and go into hiding where they know no one will find them, because no one ever goes there: feminist bookstore Women and Women First.

Best Bits: Candace and Toni trying to verbally intimidate each other. "I, myself was a bit of a whiz kid. Toni the Pony, they called me," Toni says. Candace retorts: "And I was a whiz woman. When I went to the bathroom, it was loud. I was called 'Candace, that woman who looks like a horse who pees like a horse.'"

Duds: The dance battle. That joke peaked in the early 2000s. It wasn't great then, and by the time Andy Samberg dance-punched his way through a forest in 2007's Hot Rod, it was thoroughly dead. Just as in real battles, no one wins.

Deep Cuts: The boat in the yacht scene might say Montauk, N.Y., but, hey, what's that over Fred's shoulder? It's the Marquam Bridge! And there's the Ross Island Bridge, and the South Waterfront! This was a nice touch: It gave the flashback a kind of homemade feel, like at a school play where they accidentally turn on the lights on a stagehand. DIY OR DIE.

Grade: B. Toni and Candace were never my favorites—the whole “feminists are no fun” thing is pretty tired—but this bit makes them somewhat more engaging. With a backstory, they feel more like people: They’re not just arbitrarily angry women who fell out of the sky, but rather  criminals in hiding. That said, I'm not so sure about following only one story per episode. It worked this time, but it's a less forgiving format: Ill-conceived skits won't just end, they'll drag on for 22 long minutes.

WWeek 2015