Should You Cozy Up To Togetherness?

What Is This Thing?

Angelenos Brett and Michelle, married parents of two, are having trouble keeping the sexy spark of their relationship alive...or, really, rekindling it. That their household has just grown to the tune of two adults crashing in their living room -- Brett's friend Alex, a struggling actor who's just been evicted from his apartment, and Michelle's sister Tina, who's in the middle of relocating to L.A. from Houston -- probably isn't going to help matters much.

When Is It On?

Sundays at 9:30 PM on HBO.

Why Was It Made Now?

With The League about to end and Transparent a critical hit for Amazon, the TV medium has never been a better fit for the brothers Duplass. And as Girls enters its fourth season, HBO might as well remind us that it's not only single twentysomething Brooklyn women who can be self-involved and self-deluded: married people on the west coast have their moments, too.

What's Its Pedigree?

The aforementioned mumblecore film pioneers Jay and Mark Duplass -- writer-directors of Baghead, Cyrus, and Jeff Who Lives At Home; producers of Safety Not Guaranteed and The Skeleton Twins -- created the series with Steve Zissis, who plays Alex; Mark Duplass also stars as Brett. And the ladies are no less than indie film royalty: Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures, The Informant!) plays Michelle; Amanda Peet (Please Give, The Way, Way Back) plays Tina. Suddenly Everywhere Ken Marino also appears in a secondary role in the pilot, though not one that suggests he'll be back.

...And?

Watching one of the many films the Duplasses have been involved in (I'm also including Lynn Shelton, in whose Humpday and Your Sister's Sister Mark Duplass stars, and while I know she's directed other people's episodic TV, maybe if this show works she could get one too?) (see her latest film, Laggies; it's on VOD now!), it never occurred to me how well the whole mumblecore ethos of dropping the viewer right into the middle of a tiny world and letting her figure out the situation as it organically unfolds -- no high-concept premises; no laborious world-building -- would suit a TV series. But wow, it works so well! Other than the inciting incident of Alex's eviction, which forces the other characters to rearrange themselves around him with attendant exposition (and very little of it), the pilot doesn't feel pilot-y at all.

With a show like this, plot is hardly the point anyway: it's a character study, and the characters are sharply drawn in all their dimensions, so that Alex's splashy eviction has less impact, at least on me, than the entirely silent sequence of Alex grabbing Brett and Michelle's infant son Frank to take him for his first-ever dip in the ocean after Michelle had said on the drive there that she wanted to share that moment with Brett. Michelle's hard look at Brett and his mouthed apology from across the beach, which Alex doesn't notice, is the kind of tiny communion that make up a marriage, and which give the viewer a lot more hope that this sexually-slumped couple is going to make it in the long run than the leads in FX's similarly-themed but much broader Married ever did.

But the best thing about the show so far (I've watched the first two) is that, for a creator/director/producer/star, Mark Duplass seems to have little enough vanity about his own role to let his female co-stars outshine him. Lynskey and Peet are so great in their very different roles -- Michelle, the squishy and aimless stay-at-home-mom, and Tina, the brittle and aggressive singleton. I love Peet so much in this part (a less bitchy variation on her Please Give performance) that I'm already furious about her inevitably being overlooked for award nominations this summer. And while Tina's burgeoning frenemy-to-friendship with Alex would, on a lesser show, seem contrived, so far all the beats of its evolution have been effective and earned.

...But?

I won't go so far as to say that Mark Duplass is a problem in his role, but I feel like he's kind of a polarizing performer, and at least in the first two episodes, his Brett is the least interesting character, shading into "most annoying" with Episode 2.

Otherwise, though? In its understated way, it's pretty great. For the sake of triaging my TV viewing for maximum efficiency, I rarely watch ahead even when I get screeners, but in this case, I couldn't resist, and actually had a hard time stopping at two.

...So?

If you like the Duplasses' filmography, you will probably like this a lot -- I do, so I did. Even if you don't, the combined charm of Lynskey, Zissis, and especially Peet might still put it over for you.