The Studio, Seth Rogen’s cosy Hollywood satire which dropped on Apple TV+ earlier this year, features a glut of industry figures cameoing as themselves: Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Zac Efron, Ron Howard, Zoë Kravitz, Nicholas Stoller. Unless you also happen to work in the movie business, that last name probably won’t mean much: in the show Stoller is introduced as a reliable writer of kid-friendly fare – The Muppets, Captain Underpants – who can make a decent job of the IP-driven film (“the Kool-Aid movie”) that Rogen’s studio head, Matt Remick, has been forced to pursue.
In real life, Stoller did indeed write those films. Yet he’s also a key figure in the later years of the Judd Apatow-abetted Frat Pack era, responsible for a number of box office hits including Sex Tape, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek and Neighbors, which starred Rogen and Rose Byrne as a couple warring with the fraternity next door. Pairing lowbrow farce with zingy dialogue and hapless beta male protagonists, these were out-and-out comedies made at a time when the genre occupied a significant slice of the cinematic zeitgeist.
Those days are over, but Stoller has adapted his shtick to the requirements of the age. In Apple TV+’s Platonic, now returning for a second season, he teams up with his wife, co-writer Francesca Delbanco, for a comedy drama starring Rogen and Byrne, this time as two mischief-loving college pals reunited in midlife after a five-year falling out. Byrne is Sylvia, a married mother of three whose life of predictable happiness and domestic drudgery is beginning to chafe; Rogen plays Will, a recently divorced brewmaster who wears aspirationally quirky outfits and likes kicking over parked e-scooters.
Platonic has a fair amount in common with its cinematic predecessors. It relies heavily on the likability of its stars and a healthy roster of eccentric supporting characters (including Sylvia’s eight-year-old son, who coolly suggests controversial true-crime documentary Dahmer for family film night) and is powered by a series of silly set-pieces. Season one saw the duo snatch a collar off a ferocious doberman, stumble round a grocery store high on ketamine, and – my favourite – take a tour of the abandoned nursing home Sylvia feels cornered into buying (very “colonial hospice, Cape Cod mortuary,” nods Will).
There are also differences. Platonic is lightweight, comforting entertainment primarily focused on the gag, but it has real depth, too. During an argument, Will calls Sylvia “a miserable stay-at-home mom who hangs out with me to escape your boring life.” That’s not quite true: Sylvia’s not miserable, she’s a frustrated fun-lover low on self-esteem after 13 years out of the workplace. The show does a brilliant job of capturing that feeling of exclusion from the real world that often accompanies motherhood, and Byrne expertly walks the line between aspirational cool girl and relatably downtrodden housewife.
Meanwhile, Will has his own struggles – namely to find love and get along with his colleagues at the bar they run, Lucky Penny, after they decide to collaborate with a cringy diner chain. Will quits in protest, believing the value of his beer to be inextricably linked to its non-corporate edge. Platonic seems curiously keen to disabuse him of his resistance to capitalist overlords; by the first season’s end he is working at the chain’s head office and engaged to the CEO, Jenna.
This is where season two kicks off, with Sylvia organising the pair’s wedding – she’s now moonlighting as a party planner – while secretly hoping they will split. The pair do seem ill-matched – Will is a committed slacker, Jenna is an overachiever and yet quite basic (she slips lines from the Barbie movie into conversation). She’s also dismissive of Sylvia in a way that plays neatly into the motherhood theme.
Platonic ranges from great to decent company. The leads have palpable (nonsexual) chemistry, and it’s always nice to watch something that is putting serious effort into making you laugh. Byrne is undoubtedly the comic engine, a natural clown who is given plenty to do; season two begins with Sylvia posing as an eastern European glamourpuss in order to test-drive a sports car which she repeatedly stalls before fleeing.
Sometimes you can’t help wondering if Platonic would work better if its most hilarious moments were smooshed together into a lean comic movie rather than padded out into a flabby, 10-hour-long TV series. Having worked through the tensions caused by an adult male-female relationship in season one, the show now asks whether Will and Sylvia should continue their mildly dysfunctional friendship. This question doesn’t provide quite enough direction or dramatic substance: the storylines are circular, the bickering is repetitive and there’s a distinct streaming-era bagginess to proceedings. Still, there remains a lot to enjoy here.
