‘Friends’ in (great) need
“Friends From College,” a new Netflix show that wastes a great cast, makes me wish there was a rating system to rank the levels of annoyance in TV shows. If there were, this one, created by Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco and available on Friday, July 14, would score big time. It may not be the worst show of the year — the year is barely half over — but it certainly is the most annoying. I give it four grimaced sighs.
“Friends” is exactly what it sounds like, a show about a group of people who have known each other since college. To begin with, the college is Harvard, which is a wonderful institution, but,
really, if someone tells you you’re going to meet a bunch of people from Harvard, don’t you already feel a kind of resentment?
Harvard is a perfect place for these insufferably entitled jerks to have attended. Ethan Turner (Keegan-Michael Key) is a midlist literary novelist married to Lisa (Cobie Smulders), a corporate attorney. Ethan has been hooking up off and on with Sam (Annie Parisse) since graduation, although she is married to Jon (Greg Germann). They have a couple of children, one of whom is ever so preciously named Dashiell. Max (Fred Savage) is Ethan’s book editor and is dating Felix (Billy Eichner), a physician specializing in fertility cases. Nick (Nat Faxon) is an overaged frat boy and Marianne (Jae Suh Park) is marriage-phobic and the only one in the group who knows that Ethan and Sam have regular hookups.
There are some pointless minor story lines, such as Ethan turning to young adult fiction after Max is the only one at the publishing house who likes his latest adult novel. But really, we’re just waiting for the Ethan-Sam thing to blow up. Along the way, two other members of the group hook up, and a drunken Max tries to hook up with Ethan. The plotting is so bad that Stoller and Delbanco throw in a completely unbelievable scene, with no setup, in which Marianne teaches one of Sam’s children how to drive a car just so Mommie’s Mercedes SUV with the bulletproof windows can roll into a swimming pool later on. How madcap.
The eight episodes are often marked with scenes pointing out how figuratively inbred the group is. They go to a wedding and claim “the party table.” Have you ever gone to a wedding reception where there’s a table full of rowdy drunks? If so, don’t you just wish they’d go away? At another point, Lisa is stuck on a plane with a bunch of drunken male colleagues and desperate to get away from them.
If you make it that far in the series, you’ll be having what she’s having.
That pretty much sums up the experience of watching this mess. By the way, assuming Smulders could have her pick of parts after nine brilliant years on “How I Met Your Mother,” why in the world would she sign on to another group-focused show? Granted, this is a great cast, but their talent doesn’t begin to make their characters into people with whom you’d want to spend five minutes. Key’s considerable comic skills are badly woven into Ethan’s character, who falls back on doing funny voices and facial expressions when he’s feeling tense. “Key and Peele” benefited from those skills, but here, they just make Ethan more obnoxious.
Some of the guest stars stand out, if only because they aren’t burdened with having to try to make their characters tolerable for eight episodes. Seth Rogen shines as Paul Dobkin, known as “party dawg” at Harvard and now a divorced surgeon who thinks the party has yet to end.
Inevitably, this series evokes “thirtysomething” and “The Big Chill,” except in this case, everyone is turning 40 and there’s no dead guy to bring them all together.
Just a deadly concept and script.
It may not be the worst show of the year — the year is barely half over — but it certainly is the most annoying.