There's a moment in the middle of the first episode of Friends from College (streaming on Netflix starting Friday) when a character is having trouble with a car while arriving at a beautiful house that's all glass and steel. "This is like a Black Mirror episode," he says.
No, it isn't. It more like a bad NBC comedy from that era when Friends and Seinfeld were popular and there was some desperation among broadcasters to have comedies about a gaggle of handsome, cool people. Friends from College is beyond bad. It is a dismal failure. It features insufferable people. It wastes a formidable amount of talent. Worse, it's not even fascinatingly bad.
Even bad TV comedy can be interesting, mind you. It reminds us that comedy is hard; that what can seem funny to people living inside the TV racket can be repulsive to others, and it reminds us that good actors are not immune from terrible mistakes. Really bad TV can also be useful in assessing other people. If you know anyone who thinks Friends from College is great, tell them they need help. They do.
The premise is this: A married couple, semi-successful writer Ethan (Keegan-Michael Key) and lawyer wife Lisa (Cobie Smulders from How I Met Your Mother), move from Chicago to New York City, and thus reunite with a group of their university friends living there. Will it be a great frolic for old, close buddies united again in adulthood? Who cares? These are the least interesting people seen on TV – or streaming services – since the dawn of the medium.
The series is utterly tone-deaf to anything that is remotely like contemporary urban life. It purports to be a comedy and mistakes vapidity for humour. It further purports to be poignant and mistakes self-indulgence for angst. The fact that it even got made says a great deal about the incompetence of some Netflix executives. Talk about tone-deaf.
At the core of the alleged comedy and poignancy is the fact that Ethan has been having a long affair with Samantha (Annie Parisse), a rich designer of something or other, who has a husband (Greg Germann) and a child. See, they had a secret hook-up in college years ago and just never stopped. The affair was a peachy, on-the-side thing when they lived in different cities, but now that they both live in New York City, they decide to end it. They can't. Friends from College is the sort of series that features one character looking at the other while the song Wild Horses plays on the soundtrack. You know: "Wild horses couldn't drag me away." Then they embrace and kiss – while you roll your eyes and reach for the remote. Yes, it's that crass and unsubtle.
There is no romance at the heart of all this crassness and nothing poignant about the situation because these people have no vulnerability. They only have dumb, selfish impulses.
The characters surrounding Ethan and Sam are as juvenile as they are. Fred Savage plays Max, a literary gent who handles Ethan's work. He suggests the writer try doing Young Adult fiction. Any type of criticism makes Ethan talk in strange cartoonish voices, which makes the viewer want to slap him. It seems odd that nobody else has the same reaction. Max is gay and his partner is a doctor, played by Billy Eichner. He's a fertility specialist who helps out Ethan and Lisa, but charges them a lot of money. Which is, obviously, hilarious.
In the second episode – yes, I watched on, with professional interest in appalling comedy – Ethan and Sam are doing their sexy thing at Sam's house when things go awry. What happens next requires that old comedy standby, the dead pet that must be replaced, to be employed. While this stuff plays out, Ethan's wife, Lisa, is being introduced to her new work colleagues – guys who whip out their penis at meetings and scream obscenities at colleagues on the phone. It all mounts to an ugly mess of half-baked material that would not have made it into one of those dumb network comedies, back in the day, about a gaggle of handsome friends doing dumb stuff.
What we have here is a crime against comedy. Avoid it at all costs. Maybe you enjoy Netflix because there are no commercials? Well there are 30-second commercials for pain-reliever with more substance and laughs than this thing.