Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne are modern comedy’s best male-female duo, and they cement that status with the second season of Apple TV+’s Platonic.
The story of a fortysomething man and woman trying to maintain a non-sexual friendship amidst familial, marital, and career ups and downs, creators/writers/directors (and real-life husband-and-wife) Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco’s hilarious series, returning Aug. 6, is a testament to amusing chemistry. Rogen and Byrne are so ideally well-paired—his ragamuffin slacker wiseassery meshing perfectly with her frazzled put-together anxiety and wannabe-cool awkwardness—that they make it TV’s most steadfast laugh-out-loud affair.
The duo may not quite yet be Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (or Mike Nichols and Elaine May, or Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara), but they’re quickly entering the all-timer conversation.
Having reconciled at the wedding of friends Andy (Tre Hale) and Katie (Carla Gallo), who are already kaput, brewmaster Will (Rogen) and lawyer-turned-homemaker-turned-event planner Sylvia (Byrne) have mended fences. In fact, Sylvia is planning Will’s nuptials to Jenna (Rachel Rosenbloom), the CEO of the burgers-and-beers chain Johnny Rev that he’s now joined, embracing the corporate lifestyle he’d previously shunned.
This is a sign of maturity on Will’s part, even though he’s unhappy that the branded pubs he’s set to oversee are called “Jay 6” (a most unfortunate name that apparently tested well). Sylvia is proud of Will for turning a corner. Still, she’s also a perpetual meddler in his life, and when she hears that he has a secret crush on another woman, she takes it as an obvious sign that he should call things off with Jenna.
Making matters messier, at Will’s engagement party, a champagne fiasco compels Will and Sylvia to embark on an impromptu liquor store run that raises Jenna’s suspicions that something is going on between the two. Things don’t get better between Will’s BFF and bride-to-be over the first few episodes of Platonic, whose numerous narrative strands are rife with tension.
Just as Will (all loud print shirts, bucket hats, and shaggy mullet) is a quirky square peg attempting to jam himself into a round mass-market hole, Sylvia is striving to make an uneasy post-40 transition back into the workforce, all as she manages a household that’s financially supported by hunky lawyer husband Charlie (Luke Macfarlane, even better than before), who’s currently training to be on Jeopardy.
That game show appearance is one of the season’s highlights, leading to calamity and, with it, a drastic decision by Charlie, who like his compatriots is unsatisfied with his lot in life and desperate to make a change for the better.
As before, Platonic is a sharp and insightful look at the push-pull between immaturity and maturity, selfishness and responsibility, and the personal and the professional, plumbing its characters’ insecurities, worries, and stresses to witty effect.
Stoller and Delbanco know their suburban Los Angeles milieu and its frazzled inhabitants, and they mine their various mid-life crises—born from discontent over careers, clans, obligations, and fears that they’ve lost their youthful opportunities to be and do anything—for consistent humor. The quest for a healthy work-life balance, and a friendship that can withstand the strains of adulthood, has rarely been funnier.
Credit for that goes, first and foremost, to Stoller and Delbanco, whose writing delivers punchy one-two combos for the series’ many players, which additionally include Will’s Lucky Penny brewery mates Reggie (Andrew Lopez) and Omar (Vinny Thomas), and Sylvia’s precocious three kids.
Platonic generates laughs from all corners, setting a flawlessly silly-yet-realistic tone that’s spiked with over-the-top catastrophes. The first of those occurs on a golf course where Will demonstrates that he’s not the next Tiger Woods, creating a mess which thwarts his effort to call off his wedding to Jenna—a plan of attack that’s motivated by his frustration with Jenna’s lack of interest in sex, and is encouraged by Sylvia despite the fact that her prior objections to Will’s first marriage caused a rift she doesn’t want to reopen.
Great scripts and proficient direction, however, wouldn’t do much for Platonic if Rogen and Byrne didn’t have such a natural rapport. Though on the surface resembling yin-yang opposites with little in common, the actors share a kindred weirdness and wildness that lurks, unexpectedly, beneath their respective surfaces.
Thanks to their dynamic turns, their protagonists’ idiosyncratic individual issues—Will’s struggle to grow up while remaining his idealistic and hardheaded self; Sylvia’s effort to reconcile her professional ambitions and domestic duties with her waxing and waning desire to feel young and cool—harmonize, even as they repeatedly find themselves at odds over their bonkers co-dependence. Equally game to make a--es of themselves in service of a choice gag, the stars prove, as they did in their two Neighbors collaborations, that they’re a match made in absurdist heaven.
Its episodes generally running no more than 35 minutes, Platonic is a snappy portrait of middle age and its myriad highs, lows, and complicated headaches, and Stoller and Delbanco plumb real, relatable emotions without ever sacrificing laughs; the priority is always on ridiculousness.
Whether it’s Sylvia joining Will and Katie on a canoe ride down the L.A. river (“the anus of Los Angeles”), Katie becoming a weird-talking podcaster with a catchphrase (“Don’t ask, don’t get”), a collection of sudden gross-out surprises, or a late, inspired bit involving Reggie and Will screaming at each other about Celsius energy drinks (which the former claims, nonsensically, are “clinically proven to function!”), the series is adept at balancing the sweet and the stupid.
It never loses its footing as it juggles multiple daffy disasters on its way to its finale, and it adds to its mix excellent cameos from Saturday Night Live vets Aidy Bryant (lampooning cringe-y L.A. entertainment industry kooks), Beck Bennett (as a lame-o “wild child”), and Kyle Mooney (as a uniquely passive-aggressive brewery psycho).
Seventeen years after his feature debut Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Stoller remains Hollywood’s most reliable comedy director—a vanishing breed of filmmaker who knows how to set-up, stage, and cut a scene for maximum mirthfulness—and Delbanco is just as skillful. Together, they make Platonic a show to adore, as do Rogen and Byrne, whose superlative performances elevate the proceedings above its small-screen peers, as well as confirm that they’re the jokey genre’s reigning power couple.
