EMPTY NEST SYNDROME
Mrs. Fletcher a fine new series about a loving mother and her jerk of a son
Mrs. Fletcher
Debuts Sunday, Crave
Within the past few years, it seems every peer on my Facebook feed sent their first child off to college and, good lord, the grief. Such buildup, such rivers of tears. The existential anxieties along with all that Container Store extravagance — all because of what’s supposed to be a good thing, a successful departure from the nest.
I thought we were made of tougher stuff, but apparently not. Barely a few weeks pass before you see celebratory photos of the kid’s first visit home. There’s loving your children and then there’s being besotted with them.
Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to Eve Fletcher, the fed-up single mother Kathryn Hahn so enticingly, so relatably portrays in the scrumptious new dramedy Mrs. Fletcher. Eve’s popular but brutish 18-year-old son, Brendan (Jackson White), is a self-absorbed jerk on the day she drives him to his first-year dorm at a campus several hours away.
He deprives her of even a hint of gratitude or fond farewell, choosing to spend the last minutes before they depart upstairs in his bedroom, receiving oral sex from his ex-girlfriend, while Eve packs the van.
Because Eve unfortunately overheard the crude, misogynistic names Brendan calls the girl while they’re being intimate, she tries to talk to her son about respect while driving to the university.
“You have to be nice to women,” she stammers. “Especially now, you know, in this day and age — in life, really.” He tunes her out and turns up the radio.
With Brendan gone, Eve realizes she spent too many years forgetting to have a life outside of raising him and working at her job. That she comes home, pours a glass of wine and opens her laptop to explore the wide world of streaming hardcore porn is not as shocking at it might have once seemed. It’s 2019 — better late than never to the party of one.
Mrs. Fletcher is faithfully adapted from Tom Perrotta’s 2017 novel — as it ought to be, since Perotta is in charge here as creator and producer of this seven-episode series. Because he’s a master of writing about a certain cynical strain of suburban ennui, Perrotta knows exactly what to do, which is mainly just get out of the way of a terrific cast and a skilled raft of episode directors.
Eve also enrols in a personal essay-writing class at the local community college. There are only a few other students in the class — one of them is Julian (Owen Teague), a quiet, 18-yearold freshman who happens to have been on the receiving end of Brendan’s bullying in high school. Julian instantly develops a crush on Eve, who is not altogether opposed to his interest: It fuels the older-woman/younger-lover fantasies she’s been exploring online.
The running theme is how quickly we tend to shut off the avenues that may lead us to our greater satisfactions — even the private ones. The show excels at weaving a diverse bundle of stories together into one about personal awareness.
Although obviously and correctly centred on Hahn as Eve, the real surprise is White’s memorable and terrifically nuanced performance as Brendan.
The best parts follow Brendan into his disastrous first semester.
He’s cocky and confident in a socially woke, liberal studies environment that no longer puts a primacy on conferring BMOC status on each and every dudebro who swaggers across the quad.
He’s shunned by young women, abandoned by his roommate and written off by his academic adviser — and, to a great degree, he deserves it.
Beneath his toughness, he feels rejected by his father (Josh Hamilton), Eve’s ex-husband, who has remarried a younger woman and now has a young autistic son.
“The thing is, you’re good. I don’t have to worry about you,” he assures Brendan, before cutting short a parents’ weekend visit. “You’re so smart, you’re good at sports — people love you. You’re good, yeah?”
That couldn’t be farther from the truth, and it has always been Perrotta’s great gift to give dimension and depth to characters who, on the surface, haven’t earned our sympathies. Mrs. Fletcher is filled with funny and awkward scenes in which the lead character has her world greatly opened, but it is perhaps more memorable (and more unique) as a show about a young man who finds the world is shutting him out.