Reaching manhood yet failing to grow up
The Show: Flaked, Season 1, Episode 7 The Moment: The unmanning Lackadaisical furniture maker Chip (Will Arnett, series co-creator) is losing his studio in Venice, Calif., to his ex-wife Tilly (Heather Graham), a successful actress, and her new lover, a developer. Alicia (Annabeth Gish) escorts him into the developer’s office. Her office.
“So you and Tilly are lovers?” Chip sputters.
Alicia rolls her eyes. “I don’t get it,” she says. “Tilly sticks up for you all the time. She just refuses to see you for the leech and parasite that you are.”
Chip rises. Alicia offers to walk him out. “Don’t bother, sweetheart,” he says. “You know what I don’t get? Why you people won’t take me seriously.”
At first, this series seems pretty shaggy. Chip and Dennis (David Sullivan) go to AA meetings, bike around Venice, chase after the same waitress. But slowly, Arnett’s intentions become clear.
The first clue is the shorts. All the guys wear them; you can count the appearance of long pants on one hand. There’s Tilly’s house, a sleek fortress staffed by beautiful women who baffle Chip because they won’t flirt with him. There’s Dennis’s mom (Kirstie Alley), who alarms him because she’s still sexual in her 60s.
But when Chip calls Alicia “sweetheart,” it adds up: Arnett is driving a final nail into the coffin of male significance. Chip — even his name is slight — and his man-child pals are irrelevant; the women in their lives have passed them by.
Chip doesn’t understand why “you people” don’t “take him seriously.” Arnett hears a cri de coeur for manhood. Flaked streams on Netflix Canada. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.