GEN X HAS ITS DAY
Designated Survivor; 51-year-old Tea Leoni as an overworked diplomat on CBS’s Madam Secretary; 40-year-old Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope in ABC’s Scandal), or, once in a while, serving as master manipulators (48-year-old Christian Slater in USA’s Mr Robot).
What’s frequently missing is the generation’s more subtle and artful expressions of indecisive lassitude – the built-in alienation; the lifelong romance with ennui. I miss that about us. Lately we seem capable but boring.
Peter Farrelly and Bobby Mort’s bitterly funny Loudermilk, a 10-episode dramedy premiering on Tuesday on the AT&T/Audience Network, offers an aged example of the species, with Ron Livingston as Sam Loudermilk, a 50-year-old former rock critic and recovering alcoholic who lives in the city once regarded as the epitome of Gen-X ethos (and pathos): Seattle.
Loudermilk supervises an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter that meets at a Catholic church; at night, he’s a janitor polishing marble floors in office lobbies. He shares a shabby but comfortable apartment with his sponsor and best friend, Ben (Will Sasso). Loudermilk resents technology and is unmoved by the prevalent notion that “Get off my lawn” is an effective millennial retort to an elder’s opinion.
“You live in a world with other people. Get your nose out of your phone and you might see that,” he tells a young woman who has cut in front of him in line at the coffee shop to recite a long list of drink orders. “Why are you getting coffee for the whole office?” he continues. “Have you never heard of Betty Friedan? Gloria Steinem?”
“Maybe you need to be on medication,” she replies.
“I am on medication,” Loudermilk yells. “It’s called coffee, and I can’t get it because I have to wait for you to order for everyone in your millennial clown car.”
With just enough wear and wrinkles enhancing his boyish sarcasm, Livingston gives a fine performance as a man whose sourness is an attribute. Kids, this is what happens to the man who can never stick to the sunny side of the street – he becomes the living ghost of old John Cusack movies.
We soon discover that Loudermilk did find love, once, but he lost it in an inebriated car crash. Now four years sober, Loudermilk is content to be a curmudgeon.
He brightens a bit at the arrival of an attractive next-door neighbour (Laura Mennell), but the real change in his life comes when he takes pity on a young addict, Claire (Anja Savcic), who copes with her father’s death through drugs and alcohol.
All this, and still it’s a comedy. Co-creator Farrelly, who with his brother made a string of delightfully ill-mannered movies like Dumb & Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, has retained an essential (if risky) belief that jokes about substance abuse and people with disabilities (with disabled actors playing those roles) can still be funny when expertly handled. Despite a number of tangential shenanigans, Loudermilk remains resolutely focused on its title character’s permanent condition, which is resonant of an old Nirvana track: I hate myself and want to die.
A similarly beautiful grouchiness sets the tone for Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, currently in its superb second season on Thursday nights on FX.
In the tradition of nothing-means-everything vignettes, the show explores the believably exasperating life of Sam Fox (played by 51-year-old Adlon), a single mother of three demanding daughters in Los Angeles.
Sam, who found early success as a child actress, pieces together enough bit parts, voice-overs and commercial work to eke out a comfortable living for her family, as well as her mother, Phyllis (Celia Imrie), who somewhat ungratefully occupies the guest house.
A few of Better Things’s best moments have also involved the dreaded get-off-your-phone conflicts that seem mandatory whenever Gen-X tries to connect with its Gen-Z offspring. In one memorable restaurant scene last season, Sam suggests that her tuned-out teenager Max (Mikey Madison) go sit with the man at the next table who is more interested in his phone than his female companion. “You should sit over there since you both don’t listen, and I will sit here with his lovely date.”
These scenes are perhaps sending a necessary message to future historians: not all of us fell quietly and passively into the screen. Years from now, Gen-X characters will either look like all those cardigan-wearing Silent Generation sitcom dads bemoaning shaggy hair and loud music, or we’ll look like concerned prophets of doom trying to snap the world out of a trance.
Viewers of the show already know that Sam is much more than a nag. She cares deeply for her daughters, who have been given a modern upbringing that emphasises independence and freethinking. Nevertheless, Sam’s house is a claustrophobic swirl of incessant emotional needs.
Better Things also deals with the unlikelihood that Sam will ever find a suitable mate – and for a minute, I found myself wondering if she and Sam Loudermilk might hit it off, if only they didn’t live in different worlds on different networks.
In this week’s episode, Sam’s anger boils over when, on a family TV night, one of the girls callously flips right past the sight of their mother on the screen in a role. In her tirade about feeling underappreciated, Sam asks her children if they would even be able to think of anything nice to say at her funeral.
Considering it, the girls light candles and offer eulogies to their mother.
Is it too much to ask to be appreciated? To be noticed? Getting older by the minute, Generation X may well go to its grave still begging for just a little more love.