Portlandia, Season 5, Episode 3: For Your Health!

The Peeves: Hypochondria, non-Western medicine, raw milk, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, organ transplants, water aerobics.

Put a Cap on It: If you thought Republicans were the only ones out to skewer healthcare, then you, my friend, were mistaken. It's Fred and Carrie's target in the latest episode of Portlandia.

The season's first two episodes found the show doing away with its sketch format, opting instead for episode-long story arcs that pretty much followed one set of characters. This one's a bit different. It follows three pairs as they struggle with a uniting theme: their health. The storylines are woven together throughout the show, but the characters never meet.

In the show's opening, feminist bookstore owner Candace (Fred) gets a heart attack while yelling at Girl Scouts for selling boxes with women on them. This sends her to the hospital, where she's told she needs to exercise. She opts for a heart transplant instead—but not a man's heart!—and eventually settles on that of a chimp.

Meanwhile, Brendan and his unnamed wife—the music snobs from season one's "Shooting Star Preschool" sketch—are feeling ill, but a doctor, a nutritionist and an herbalist all tell them they're fine. A man selling raw milk on the street, however, offers his wares, and his magic moo juice cures all their ails. When he's busted, Brendan and wife begin selling raw milk, until the cops bust their operation, too.

Finally, Peter and Nance, from season one’s “Is it Local?” bit, are confronted with some bad news. Peter has cancer, and only 40 to 42 years to live. He’s dejected, but then remembers—or, rather, thinks he remembers—that he gets a Make-a-Wish Foundation wish. Of course, he doesn’t—the cutoff age is 18—which sends Nance into a scramble to try and appease his babyish greed. She  eventually tries to get cancer, too, going so far as to buy a ticket to the Chernobyl Power Plant which, uh, has its own airport.

Best Bits: Of the three story arcs, Peter and Nance's is the best. Her attempts to get cancer are its peak—she smokes and eats cigarettes, sticks her head in a microwave (shoutout to all the Infinite Jest readers) and goes to a tanning salon. But best of all is when she straps a bunch of phones to her head and tries to call them. This bit does what Portlandia does best: dredge up banal anxieties and tease them out into stories.

Duds: If Fred and Carrie actually paid any attention to the state in which their characters reside, they would know it's actually totally legal to sell raw milk here, providing it's sold straight from the farm. Fred and Carrie get a cow for that bit—pretty "straight from the farm" if you ask me. As satirists, they're certainly not obligated to be factually correct. But satire's funnier if it's based in truth.

Deep Cuts: Where would a black-market raw milk salesman be posted up? Try the sidewalk outside People's Food Co-op!

Grade: D. This episode's format falls somewhere between its two predecessors this season and the sketch-based approach of earlier seasons. It gets the worst of both worlds: It chooses narratives over jokes, but then doesn't allow these narratives much time to develop. Best to wait for someone to upload the episode's Peter and Nance bits to YouTube, and skip the rest.

WWeek 2015