New comedy ‘Alone Together’ is begging for your company.
Television comedy comes in many packages, of course, but among the most popular on some outlets such as FX and Hulu is what I like to call Comedy of the Annoying — sitcoms about people you probably wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with in person but who can be hilarious in 30-minute bites. Think “Difficult People,” “You’re the Worst” and, on broadcast, “2 Broke Girls” and “Mom.”
There is a presumed edginess about Comedy of the Annoying that you wouldn’t expect to find on Freeform — until now. “Alone Together,” created and written by comic Esther Povitsky, Benji Aflalo and Eben Russell, is about two, well, difficult people — Povitsky and Aflalo — who are made for each other. Perhaps only for each other, and that’s the basis of the show’s humor, as you’ll see when it premieres Wednesday. In fact, while I generally try avoid comparing one show to another, if Benji’s character were gay, you could think of “Alone Together” as “Difficult People: The Early Years.”
“Alone” focuses on Esther (Povitsky) and Benji (Benji Aflalo) who are ill equipped to fit in with the ultra chic of Los Angeles. Benji lives in the Beverly Hills mansion of his older, hipper brother, Dean (Chris D’Elia) where he dreams of getting his brother’s dating hand-me-downs, but will settle for almost anyone. Securely insecure, when he meets a female prospect, he pretends to be as rich and suave as his real estate broker bro. It isn’t long, though, before he reveals his true nature with, for example, a disparaging remark that he was born with his mother’s hips.
Esther hooks up with hairy fat guys from time to time but is crushing madly and futilely on Dean, so much so that she poses for photos with him as part of a scheme to help him rid himself of a woman he’s been dating for a couple of weeks.
You could say both Esther and Benji are rather sad characters, even willing to demean themselves, yet there is a kind of defiance at the root of their self-focus. They aren’t quite as insular as Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner’s characters in “Difficult People,” but they only feel completely free when they are tossing brainy, artfully constructed deadpan one-liners at each other. It’s kind of like a Tama Janowitz story come to contemporary life.
Esther and Benji are a couple of aging children, with urban attention deficit disorder. She gets him to wait in line outside a makeup store so she can score extra helpings of a new makeup brand, but he wanders off to a fish store, formerly a pot dispensary, run by a stoner played by Bobby Lee. He’s fascinated with fish and ignores sage advice that any woman he brought home would recoil in horror at the sight of a huge aquarium in his bedroom.
Produced by, among others, Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer of Lonely Island, “Alone Together” skates very close to being too annoying, but never loses its appeal because of the writing, of course, but also because Povitsky and Aflalo are fully credible at all times — not just in their spoton performances and comic timing, but also in how they look and move. They go out of their way a lot to tell strangers that they aren’t a couple and have never had sex. It’s important that that particular “shark” remain “unjumped” for the show to work. I fear Esther and Benji would lose their appeal if they ever become “Together Together.”