Darkness keeps comedy honest
Friends From College is smart, edgy and loopy
Six friends from college find themselves reunited, picking up shared lives 20 years after graduation day. But along with the familiar camaraderie, they encounter new complications and conflicts.
Have the times passed them by? That’s the question asked and answered with amusing results by Friends From College, a new eight-part comedy now on Netflix.
The viewer-friendly cast includes Fred Savage, Nat Faxon, Annie Parisse and Jae Suh Park, plus Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother) and Keegan-Michael Key (Key & Peele), as now-wed friends from college Lisa and Ethan Turner.
“Yes, it’s a comedy, but it’s a DARK comedy,” says Smulders over a light-hearted lunch alongside Key. “These friends have a tight relationship, but there’s an ever-changing scenario they have to deal with on the fly.”
“The darkness keeps it honest,” Key adds.
At the heart of the story: Key, as Ethan, a once-promising novelist, has been enjoying a friends-withbenefits connection since college with Parisse’s character, Samantha, who by now is likewise married as well as a mother. For years Ethan and Sam lived hundreds of miles apart, allowing only the rare hookup. Now, how will they handle life in the same city in the same tight social circle?
“I remember being on set and thinking, ‘Should this be FUNNY?”’ says Smulders. “I’ve been with my husband for 12 years” — actor and former SNL cast member Taran Killam, whom she married in 2012 — “and if infidelity came into my life it would be heartbreaking and tragic.”
Fortunately, Friends From College eases this threat, and the rest of the action, with a shrewd mix of smarts and loopiness.
“There isn’t a lot of judging in how it’s written or how the parts are played,” says Smulders. “It’s up to the audience to make their assumptions and judgments.”
Sam’s husband, played by Greg Germann, grumbles about how she and her college friends try to live in their shared past: “You should let the past just go,” he tells her. “The present is a pretty cool place to be.”
In any case, the present is a cool place for Key. After five seasons creating dozens of characters on Key & Peele, along with writing and producing that brilliant Comedy Central series with his co-star Jordan Peele, Key says he’s grateful for the change that Friends From College represents: “Not having to be in charge: I can’t tell you how much I relish being an interpretive artist, and not being asked to be a wholly generative artist!”
Smulders calls How I Met Your Mother (her hit CBS sitcom that ended a nine-season run in 2014), “such a beautiful thing it’s hard to compare it to anything else. But, truly, Friends from College has been a version of that. I love working in an ensemble and playing in group scenes.”
With Friends From College wrapped, Smulders and Key are busy these days with impressive theatre projects. She is starring on Broadway alongside Kevin Kline and Kate Burton in a revival of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter. He is portraying Horatio in the Public Theater’s production of Hamlet.
They are quick to praise one another. “Keegan is so funny, and so smart and quick!” Smulders says.
“For me,” Key begins, “the best way to be a good scene partner is to NOT be a good scene partner.”
He explains: “You’re giving me everything as an actor by not giving me ANYthing as a character,” he tells Smulders. “That’s my definition of the trust in this partnership.” No cheating here.