Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Out of love with the clichés
New Netflix show proves that the latest prestige comedies have become as regular as the anti-hero dramas
ANEW Netflix series, Love, from Judd Apatow and Lesley Arfin, didn’t do very much for me: With so many fictional misanthropes on offer at present, it takes a special one to compete for my attention.
And the awkward couple of Love, Mickey (Gillian Jacobs), a satellite radio producer, and Gus (Paul Rust), an aspiring television producer who tutors the young star on a supernatural show, didn’t quite make the cut for me.
But Love did serve one useful function in my thinking about television, making it clear that the guidelines for comedies with aspirations to the prestige label have become as clear as the anti-hero requirement that has become such a drag on prestige dramas.
Dramas signal their intentions to something greater by embracing the idea that – as Westley (Cary Elwes) put it in The Princess Bride – “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something” and punctuating the sentiment with a decapitated head or a shattered skull.
In prestige comedies, by contrast, life is glum and often, life is grubby. Comedian Louis CK’s heirs, male and female alike, have developed their own cliches just as surely as have the sons of Tony Soprano.
Take the protagonists, who will be arrested in their development, off-kilter or in some way determined to self-sabotage.
On her comedy Girls, (Tuesdays at 1.30am on M-Net Edge and Fridays at 9pm) Lena Dunham plays Hannah Horvath, a character who seems designed to embody every possible negative cliché about millennials in order to provoke extreme reactions from the people who like to stereotype them.
In FX’s Baskets, Zach Galifianakis washes out of French clown school, proposes to a woman after declaring how poorly his life is going and ends up working as a rodeo clown in his hometown of Bakersfield, California. Now in Love, Mickey is an obvious drug addict who shuffles around inflicting her misery on other people.
The more interesting shows in this category tend to source their protagonists’ allergic reactions to everyday life and their difficulties interacting with others to deep and interesting wells.
The titular character in Louie is a seeker, hoping to interrogate his own masculinity as he raises two daughters. On You’re The Worst, music publicist Gretchen’s (Aya Cash) slovenly antisocial behaviour prove to be leading indicators of her persistent clinical depression. And in Transparent, the Pfeffermans act out in ways that allow them to explore their sexuality, gender identities and Jewish roots.
But in lesser shows and episodes, sourness and antisocial behaviour seems to be the point. It’s a teenaged vision of rebellion and authenticity, an adolescent existentialism. Kissing your boss to avoid being fired or ordering fancy French soda at a drive- through doesn’t make you heroic or truthful; it kind of just makes you a jerk.
Sex on these comedies often comes across as a similarly grim affair, whether the girls of Girls are having it on grubby thrifted couches or in tiny New York kitchens; Mickey is letting a cocaine addict she’d rather dump pound away on her in the hopes that it will make him go away; Louie is wading through a series of doomed encounters with his friend Pamela (Pamela Adlon); Lindsay (Kether Donohue) is embarking on a series of hookups in an attempt to destroy her marriage on You’re The Worst; or Josh Pfefferman ( Jay Duplass) is seeking out Rita (Brett Paesel), the babysitter who molested him when he was a young teenager in Transparent.
Again, the best of these shows manage to mine something rich and rare out of their loucheness and sexual discomfort.
One of the things that immediately distinguished You’re The Worst from other shows in its class was the way an intended one-night stand between Gretchen and writer and fellow misanthrope Jimmy (Chris Geere) became more intimate, tender and funny as the night wore on, the pair moved from position to position, and took breaks to eat and smoke on Jimmy’s steps.
Louis CK has repeatedly used awkward, even violent, sex scenes to explore the nature of consent and the balance of power between men and women. On the second season of Transparent, when Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor) is intimate with her ex- wife Shelly (Judith Light) for the first time after she comes out as transgender, the series manages to capture the tension between Shelly’s pleasure and Maura’s unease.
What all of these scenes have in common, though, is a recognition that simply having characters shift away from the missionary position does not constitute insight.
Sexual complacency and disillusionment can be intriguing subjects. But as is the case with all sto- rytelling, specific ideas about these subjects make for richer television than a simple, grinding depiction of sexual apathy.
In this context, one of the many things that makes Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang’s Netflix series Master of None such a cool drink of water, beyond the show’s already-welcome casual diversity, friendships between men and women and experiments with form and narrative pacing, is the sense of health, optimism and effort that pervades the series.
Dev (Ansari) is still in the early years of his career as an actor, but he’s working to move beyond commercial work with focus and diligence.
His flat may not be large, but it’s clean and furnished in a way that suggests a man who has both interests and a personal aesthetic.
His friendships with Arnold ( Eric Wareheim), Denise ( Lena Waithe) and Brian (Kelvin Yu) are deep and easy, defined by shared experience and mutual curiosity about each other rather than selfsabotaging competition.
And when Dev begins dating Rachel, with whom he has an abortive encounter in the show’s pilot, he does so with clear intentions, an open heart and an endearing, almost old-fashioned, amount of effort.
They may have fallen into bed the night they met, but their path into love is anything but sloppy.
After Rachel breaks up with her boyfriend for good, Dev takes her on a carefully curated weekend trip to Nashville where she accommodates his lust for barbecue and he adjusts to the fact that she’s a vegetarian.
When they move in together, Master of None mines drama from their efforts to build a life together, with all the inevitable fights over the piles of clothes she leaves on the floor and the Campari- sticky glasses he abandons on the kitchen counter.
And when Dev and Rachel break up, it’s Rachel’s housewarming gift to Dev, a pasta-maker, that helps him figure out how to move on from his heartbreak and a stagnant career.
Just as I’ve been trained to see a middle-aged white man walk on to my television screen and start wondering where he buries the bodies generated by his midlife crisis, I now see softly-lit affluent young (or youngish) people on HBO or Netflix and brace for them to make the sort of idiotic decisions that leave me desperate to hire them career counsellors and a few sessions with an excellent therapist.
The supposed truths that both our prestige dramas and comedies claim to speak have hardened into clichés that disguise as much as they disclose. – Washington Post