With every passing installment of the House of Payne series, I wonder, more and more, how this thing stays on the air. Because it seems like it only gets more depressing with each passing installment. In fact, it says on the back of the box, “the family comedy everyone can relate to!”, and I can’t help but agree with that…if by “everyone” you mean “everyone who’s ever been in an Anton Chekhov novel”. Seriously, I saw a live performance of The Cherry Orchard when I was in college, and by comparison, that was an episode of Mister Ed compared to Tyler Perry’s ultra-depressing House of Payne. But would House of Payne Volume Eight be more of the same? Or would the broken clock that is Tyler Perry’s career be right for the first time today?

Once again we go back out to the Payne house, which is generally a house of its homophonic equivalent, with horrors and terrors and all the pits and perils of domestic life, often hitting one right after the other like some kind of bizarre fun house attraction. And this season will feature the Paynes once again…but in something of a new light.

For once, the season didn’t start off with horror and terror and disaster. I was puzzled!  No one caught fire. No one’s house caught fire. No one got laid off. And there were jokes.  Funny jokes. Curtis and Ella were in rare form, their new neighbors were a little weird but weird in a funny way, there was a little discontent going on over at the condo, but this was really rather minor, and interspersed with wholesome lessons about teaching a baby the value of fishing.

And then it took a bizarre left turn of the most lunatic sort. But even then, the twist was funny. But this doesn’t last long as the weird and angsty kicks back up in earnest. And even this doesn’t last either. It’s strange, but most of the time I didn’t see it coming. This may well be the best season of Tyler Perry’s House of Payne yet, not that that’s saying much. It may be less charitable, but more accurate, to say it’s merely less painful than normal. Or even, to reuse the sweet pun in the headline, less payneful.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, gives Tyler Perry’s House of Payne Volume Eight a more than tolerable seven out of ten. It’s a pretty decent showing they had here, and probably the best one yet. If you haven’t been pleased with earlier installments, you’ll be surprised by this one.