Reunions and homecomings Three shows where the past is present By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Tuesday, Jun. 13, 2023

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This article was published 13/06/2023 (885 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Friends isn’t the only comedy about friendship.

This edition of Don’t Sleep on This — a semi-regular series in which the Free Press Arts & Life department will offer up (spoiler-free) recommendations of the new TV shows you should be watching — features three new comedies that explore friendship: the old, the new, and the toxic.

Somebody Somewhere

HBO

No. of seasons: 2

Comedian Bridget Everett shines in this cosy half-hour HBO comedy-drama about a 40-something woman with a promising singing career who stayed tethered to her Kansas hometown to take care of her terminally ill sister, who has died. And just like another famous Kansan, she learns there’s no place like home — for better or worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIezlm0iTFA

Sam (Everett) is a big-hearted, hilarious woman — this show boasts an impressive ratio of LOLs per minute — but she’s got equally big walls up and has a hard time letting people in for fear of hurt and abandonment. When she reconnects with the sunny, earnest Joel (Jeff Hiller) — a gay man of faith who is struggling with his relationship to religion — she finds the BFF she’s been missing.

Season 2, which just wrapped up at the end of May, finds Sam and Joel in a rhythm that, on its surface, seems sweet but is sliding into codependency. She even creates an acronym for them: NNP, or “no new people.” Of course, a dynamic like that isn’t sustainable.

Somebody Somewhere isn’t just a two-hander, however. Comedian and drag king Murray Hill provides plenty of the show’s warmth as Fred Rococo, who emcees Choir Practice, a place where Sam finds herself (and her voice) again. Mary Catherine Garrison delivers a stellar performance as Sam’s live-laugh-loving sister Tricia who is perhaps not as basic as she seems.

Music, too, plays a huge role in this show. Hearing Sam sing — and seeing her, however momentarily, triumph over her discomfort with vulnerability — is pure joy. Your new comfort watch is now streaming on Crave (and has been renewed for a third season).

Platonic

AppleTV+

No. of seasons: 1

From Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco, the husband-wife duo behind the Netflix series Friends From College, comes another binge-worthy comedy about old friendships that remind you of who you once were and how they can wreak a particular kind of havoc when they resurface in middle age.

Rose Byrne is Sylvia, a lawyer turned stay-at-home mom of three who is feeling unfulfilled. Seth Rogen is Will, Sylvia’s old college bestie who has recently split from his wife. While they haven’t been in touch in years, the news of Will’s divorce prompts Sylvia to reach out, and the pair rekindle a friendship that perhaps wasn’t always so great for them.

Byrne and Rogen actually played a married couple in Stoller’s 2014 film Neighbors, so they have proven comedic chemistry — but it’s Byrne who steals every scene she’s in. There’s plenty of tension, here, too: Charlie (Luke Macfarlane), Sylvia’s extremely nice but aggressively bland attorney husband, isn’t loving the easy shorthand between Sylvia and Will, which he perhaps doesn’t realize comes from Sylvia’s ability to be utterly herself around Will.

Platonic is midway through its debut season; new episodes arrive on AppleTV+ on Wednesdays.

Class of ‘07

Prime Video

No. of seasons: 1

This Australian half-hour comedy takes an extremely silly premise — a group of women attend their 10-year high school reunion and get stranded at their alma mater after an apocalyptic flood — and makes it a funny, insightful and surprisingly poignant rumination on female friendship and all the ways in which cliques, whether they formed in high school or in adulthood, are a means of survival.

Emily Browning is Zoe Miller, a woman living in seclusion after an embarrassing brush with viral fame as a contestant on a Bachelorette-style reality show who not only gets rejected, but whose open mouth is, unfortunately, used as a toilet by a dove with incredible aim. As flood waters start to encroach on her isolated property, she heads for her old school, which is located on higher ground, and stumbles upon her high school reunion. She tries to warn the others about the flooding, but the other women don’t believe her. They are stranded and, as it becomes increasingly clear no one is coming for them, must figure out how to live.

While Miller is the main character, this is an ensemble comedy, through and through. Claire Lovering’s turn as the power-tripped former geek Genevieve is a highlight, as is Steph Tisdell’s performance as Phoebe, whose sarcastic, “I’m not here to make friends” veneer is cracked by Renee (Emma Horn) a flightly nail tech who lies about being a doctor at the reunion and then really leans into that fateful decision.

All eight episodes of the first season, which aired in the spring, are available on Prime Video.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com