I’ll tell you what’s hot right now: friendship. Memoirs, novels, how-to guides about friendship. Podcasts, hosted by friends, about friendship. How to be a good friend, why some friends are toxic, why you need to set boundaries to ensure friendships last. How to fix all the friendships in your life. Why it’s okay some friendships end. But television, a medium well-suited to explore the ups, downs, in, outs of the subject, has been slightly barren of late. Not since Lena Dunham’s Girls has there anything approaching interesting: it’s either sitcoms about smug Americans or schmaltzy dramas. Apple’s new series Platonic, about ex-best friends reuniting mid life, is not going to redefine this genre, but it does add a few new ideas, very gently, into the mix.
We find Sylvia (Rose Byrne) and Will (Seth Rogen) in various stages of crisis. Sylvia, with her three children and lawyer husband Charlie (Luke Macfarlane), is bored, both by her house (too small) and her life as a housewife (too boring). Will possesses a bar in downtown Los Angeles and a nose for good beer. He also now has an ex-wife, Audrey (Alisha Wainwright). The reason for Sylvia and Will’s fall-out, it turns out, is because Sylvia told Will not to marry Audrey. With Audrey out of the picture, they fall together once more. Each episode presents a zany premise – drunkenly riding around Los Angeles on scooters, throwing a “divorce party” – with varying degrees of success. But you are watching for the chemistry between Rogen (seasoned professional) and Byrne (outlandishly watchable).
The whole thing is adeptly created, if not ground breaking, which is Apple TV’s MO at this point in the streaming wars. Somehow, the platform has, buck for buck, emerged as the best value platform available, partly down to one stand-out show (Severance) but mostly because its programming is usually well-acted, well-written affairs: Dickinson, Loot, Shrinking. Platonic fits that mould: the ten-episode series has been co-created by husband-wife duo Nicholas Stoller (director of early 2000s classic Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and more recent, though less classic Bros) and Francesca Delbanco (co-creator of the underrated Netflix joint Friends from College).
The jokes come thick, fast and obvious. Weird people at work, weird people at the school gates, weird people in bars: it’s low-hanging fruit. There is, somehow, discourse about When Harry Met Sally. I have no interest in researching the references to areas of Los Angeles, but the gist is so obvious that there’s no need to decipher. Will does hipster stuff, Sylvia is all white picket fences. You will sense plot machinations episodes in advance. It looks great: costume designer Kameron Lennox does a superb job of dressing the central pair, especially Will, whose wardrobe of daring short-sleeved shirts, kidult jewellery (on loan from Harry Styles?) and retro phone cases, sum up his boyish, but not uncool existence.
Platonic’s prime joy, and the one it would do well to explore even more fully if another season is commissioned, is the back-and-forth of adult friendship. Falling out with a friend is difficult, more difficult than a romantic break-up (I learnt that on a podcast, or a memoir, or maybe it was an Instagram caption). You lose sleep, you divide friend groups, you develop long-held resentment, which if left untreated, can be deadly. Platonic shows that reunions can be just as hard: reconciliation provides a sugary headrush, but those old habits are just around the bend. Toward the end of the first episode, Sylvia and Will leave each other in a screaming match; in the final seconds, they are texting each other from their beds across the city. It’s the finest few minutes of the premiere, an elucidation of their stress and co-dependence (Platonic makes for a light-hearted counterpoint to spring’s searing newcomer, Beef).
As the season continues, that dynamic only becomes more intriguing (admittedly, some of the people around them act like no one I have ever encountered, and suspect do not exist in Los Angeles, or indeed the universe), as Byrne and Rogen explore their characters’ companionship. Friends make you do dumb stuff, like snort ketamine in a fancy restaurant stall or break into an ex’s house to retrieve a gecko. That can be fun if hazardous in your 20s. What Platonic suggests is that it only gets worse as you get older: you now have new things in your life to ruin! Is it worth it? Platonic is not going to solve that particular friendship dilemma just yet, but its point of view is an amiable diversion.
The first three episodes of ‘Platonic’ are out now on Apple TV, and new episodes will be released every Wednesday
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
