Pick of the week
FRIDAY “The Kominsky Method,” Netflix.
Executive producer Chuck Lorre says change is afoot for the lead characters in “The Kominsky Method,” acting coach Sandy (Michael Douglas) and his long-time agent and best friend, Norman (Alan Arkin).
“The first season was very much a walk through the darkness in Norman’s loss of his wife, and health issues were very much a part of season one. And while health issues will remain a part of the series because that’s the reality of getting older, things change markedly for both Norman and Sandy,” Lorre teased in February during a set visit as part of the Television Critics Association winter 2019 press tour. “I wanted to write about how a light can flicker on in the darkness for people at a certain point in their life. When all else seems doomed, when despair is the general tone, things can turn around very quickly, and that’s what happens in season two.”
But don’t expect the show to shy away from the indignities of old age.
“We could bemoan the fact that aging is happening, or we can step aside and look at it as darkly comic because inside all of us who are of a certain age we are not the age of the outside,” he said. “There’s still that witness inside that doesn’t have an age, or it’s 12. … There’s comedy there because of that collision of those two perspectives. I find it funny. When it’s all falling apart, [you can] laugh or cry. I choose to laugh.”
For Lorre, showrunner of many of the most successful multicam comedies of the past two decades (“The Big Bang Theory,” “Two and a Half Men”), working on the single-camera “Kominsky Method” has been a revelation.
“Reactions are so much more potent when the camera gets close,” he said. “If
four‑camera you watch a show, the camera never gets closer than elbows, but in this world, the camera can do anything.”