FAMILY TIES
Casual is a love letter to genuine kinship Sadaf Ahsan
Every year, my siblings and I go away for a weekend. And each time – as if for the first time – there comes a moment (admittedly, often fuelled by alcohol) when the three of us joyously embrace. We tearfully declare our love – “I love you, man” – and remind one another that everything is going to be okay. It’s a profound moment. But the annual tradition of unconditional acceptance doesn’t conclude until we, like anyone who grew up in a dysfunctional family, share memories of our upbringing and ask, “How did we end up so normal?” The implication, of course, being that our parents were anything but.
The premise of Casual, a comedydrama series from Hulu (that airs in Canada on CraveTV), features a similarly idiosyncratic set of siblings linked by dysfunction. Valerie (Michaela Watkins), a recently divorced single mother and therapist, moves in with her brother Alex (Tommy Dewey), an unemployed bachelor. Together, the brother and sister raise Valerie’s teenage daughter Laura (Tara Lynne Barr). The family attempts to navigate through one relationship after another, all of which prove to be little more than casual – apart from the one they share with each other.
Cultivated by a childhood that involved two eccentric and neglectful parents, their love for each other, and the sense of protection they share, runs deep. Over Casual’s three seasons, we see Valerie and Alex find some sense of fulfilment in either friendswith-benefits or what comes precipitously close to true romantic love, but each time the relationship is disrupted by their need to rescue each other. This is inevitably followed by an epiphany that no one has been there for them in the same way they have been there for each other. Serving as pseudo parents and/or partners for one other, the pair constantly find themselves back in the non-judgmental fold of their codependency after yet another relationship blows up in their face.
This is not to say that there is no friction in their dynamic. At the end of Season 2, Alex and Valerie choose to no longer live together, a decision that plays out as a divorce of sorts. The beginning of Season 3 has the siblings meeting for drinks, however, and before long, their reliance on one another is revealed to be unchanged as they fret over everything from what they wear to see each other to the words they choose to say and, as always, how they inevitably tell each other everything. They find themselves in an inbetween space; in a form of arrested development at middle age. It’s a period that television rarely captures outside of far more melodramatic fare like Parenthood or Brothers & Sisters.
The toxic dynamic between the siblings and their narcissistic parents plays out in a darkly humorous metaphor at the end of the show’s second season when their father gleefully asks them to euthanize him. The pair’s equally unconventional mother declined the task after finding it too “unpalatable” for her sensibilities. Dutifully but begrudgingly, the brother and sister capitulate to their father’s request. Later, they recall his last words; to Valerie: “Sorry we weren’t closer, but maybe it’s for the best,” and to Alex: “You have your sister and that’s a real love.”
Their mother unintentionally reinforces this bond when she decides to hold a wake for their father in Season 3. As Valerie declares, upon discovering an invitation, “She disappears without a word and now she wants to play grieving widow? She’s not getting his ashes, we murdered him, we did the dirty work, she can’t take that from us!” This drama, surrounded by humour, plays something Valerie’s mother tells her in an episode from the first season: “We spend our lives waiting for our parents to apologize. They spend theirs waiting for a thank you.”
Casual’s multi-layered approach to scrutinizing the strange dynamic between dysfunctional parents and impressionable children extends even further in the relationship between Valerie and her daughter. While acknowledging the negative impact her narcissistic parents had on her, Valerie overcompensates with her own parenting and ends up contributing to Laura’s decline into a similarly damaged version of herself.
Despite sifting through deep family dynamics like this, Casual never feels too bleak or morose. Instead, it achieves a sense of realism, not only through moments of levity, but by maintaining a sense of hope.
In the third episode of Season 3, Valerie and Alex steal their father’s ashes as they leave the wake. They bring the ashes along with them as they wander through their suburban hometown, from a late-night café to grab doughnuts to their old high school. It’s a night that has the kind of expectation of a first date, but the warmth and understanding of a childhood survived together. A sense of comfortable stasis lingers between them as they share anecdotes of each other, or silently swap earbuds to listen to a song they both love, or exchange glares and smiles at decades-old inside jokes. The episode fades out to Monument Valley’s Dear John Letters: “Though we weren’t quite whole, turned out we were all each other needed to grow old.”
This is a pair who are not only stuck romantically, but stalled in their careers and friendships. There’s a sadness to their longing for something more, an unquenchable thirst for what comes next. But despite all of this, they remain there for one another. Their sibling relationship emerges not as a consolation prize for being unlucky in love, but as a meaningful source of strength and understanding in their respective lives.
No matter what happens in its fourth and final season, which is available now for streaming, the goal for Alex and Valerie, as it turns out, isn’t to find a happy ending elsewhere, but to hold on to the one they’ve been crafting all along with each other. In this sense, Casual has been the love letter to my siblings that I didn’t have to write.