Grilled Cheese Deluxe
S1 E7: Grilled Cheese Deluxe
The Regular Show, 2010.
Grilled cheese sandwiches are the culinary baseline of comfort: gooey, golden, dependable.
But in The Regular Show episode “Grilled Cheese Deluxe,” these humble carbs transform into the glowing beacon of Mordecai and Rigby’s reckless ambition, a culinary MacGuffin that propels the duo into a cascade of absurd lies and existential peril. First aired on September 6, 2010, this early episode cemented the show’s unique alchemy of the mundane and the surreal, blending workplace slacker comedy with cosmic stakes.
Written by J.G. Quintel, the show’s creator, and Sean Szeles, who later served as supervising director, “Grilled Cheese Deluxe” marked a definitive step in establishing the series’ rhythm. Quintel, who had previously honed his absurdist chops working on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, brought a grounded weirdness that turned simple desires—like savoring the titular grilled cheese—into an odyssey of disproportionate consequence. Szeles, for his part, brought an instinct for pacing and timing, honed during his time on Camp Lazlo, that kept the humor kinetic without veering into chaos.
The plot spirals from a single lie. Mordecai and Rigby, dispatched to pick up sandwiches for Benson, inflate their mediocre existences by pretending to be astronauts while waiting in line at Cheezers, the grilled cheese emporium of their dreams. What begins as a white lie—harmless, buttery—escalates into a cascade of increasingly unhinged fabrications that lead to an encounter with the real-life astronauts they were impersonating. The climax? A confrontation involving cosmic secrets and interdimensional space-time portals, because of course. This is Regular Show, where the most trivial of starting points inevitably leads to apocalyptic stakes.
The episode’s humor is amplified by the deadpan delivery of Quintel (voicing Mordecai) and William Salyers (Rigby), whose bickering banter nails the precarious line between best friendship and exasperated tolerance. The sharp writing is matched by the lo-fi charm of the animation, which uses restrained visuals to heighten the absurdity of the unfolding drama.
“Grilled Cheese Deluxe” is also notable for its cultural nods. The grilled cheese craze it lampoons was, at the time, cresting its wave in the real world, with food trucks and gourmet interpretations pushing the humble sandwich into haute cuisine territory. The choice of grilled cheese as the driving plot device is emblematic of Regular Show’s ethos: to elevate the banal to the extraordinary.