‘Friends From College’ squanders its Ivy League cast
Friends From College is like the New Year’s Eve of TV shows. Sparkly, fun on the outside and full of pretty people, but in reality disappointing and hollow.
Watching the Netflix series is an exercise in frustration. The comedy (streaming Friday,
out of four) is about six friends, all Harvard alums, trying to maintain their relationships as they hit 40. The ingredients of a great series are there: It’s created by Nicholas Stoller ( Neighbors and Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and newcomer Francesca Delbanco, and four of its six central characters are played by proven comedy stars Keegan-Michael Key, Fred Savage, Cobie Smulders and Nat Faxon.
The premise and the talent should add up to a funny, smartly written sitcom with great performances, right? But while it’s the type of series that seems like it will click instantly, the result is shallow and grating. Episodes rely on cheap jokes that feel outdated ( an obsession with pok- ing at Twilight) or too cringeworthy and crude to be funny (a hedge-fund bro using his genitals to control a speakerphone). The talented cast is wasted playing characters that aren’t appealing and situations that are outlandish to the point of ridiculousness.
The series kicks off when highbrow author Ethan (Key) and his lawyer wife, Lisa (Smulders), move from Chicago to New York and reunite the group, including Sam (Annie Parisse), with whom Ethan has been carrying on a longtime — and long-distance — affair. Their newfound proximity only makes their trysts more frequent and riskier.
Other friends include Max (Savage), Ethan’s eager-to-please agent; Marianne (Jae Suh Park), a low-rent actress; and Nick (Faxon), a trust-fund lothario. But they often feel like the others’ supporting players rather than members of an ensemble. What the six have in common is their bad manners and sometimes cruel conduct.
Friends From College is one of many series to try to rekindle the magical hangout sitcom, even deploying the loaded word “Friends” in the title. It does’t succeed. There’s no central location that ties the characters together, and the fact that the show starts years after friendships have changed and drifted apart doesn’t add to the ensemble’s chemistry.
It’s the bad behavior that makes the series often painful to watch. There are entertaining stories to be told about selfish people doing destructive things. Some of the films on Stoller’s résumé fall into this category, such as Get Him to the Greek, but they work because there’s a sense of levity mixed in.
When Ethan, Max and Nick get high and damage the apartment of Max’s boyfriend (an underutilized Billy Eichner), there’s no punchline to the joke, only pizza stains on the walls and a lot of screaming.
It takes more to make a series than good ingredients. The cast, the jokes, the timing and the story have to work together and spark something interesting.
Friends From College can’t fake it with gross gags and mean jibes.