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| (HBO) |
The
contrived, explosive and surprisingly cathartic conclusion to HBO’s Togetherness ended in customarily messy,
empathetic fashion. By keeping things relatively unrefined and unusually
compassionate, the half-hour series (from Mark and Jay Duplass) has skirted
around similarly-conceived “indie TV” to hit the air recently. It’s maintained
a distinctiveness.
I
wrote about the first half of Togetherness
some weeks back, so I’ll merely link to that piece here before offering up some
brief thoughts on the HBO freshman as a whole.
The
ending of the first season of Togetherness
is very, very good. In fact, within this show’s universe, it’s probably as good
as it could have been. The show’s structural challenge, to this critic anyway,
has been to maintain dramatic stakes and emotional investment in a cast of
characters who can be irritatingly prickly but are, through-and-through,
fundamentally decent. They’re also unremarkable. There have been criticisms
that claim Togetherness is the latest
in a long line of cable-situated, upper-white-middle-class chronicles; I don’t
quite see the evidence for lack of originality. The kind of specificity that
drives supposedly-related series such as Transparent
on Amazon or Girls on HBO is
absolutely intrinsic here. But the perspective is different; perhaps, even
fresh.
Togetherness
is so mild and familiar that it does, in fact, feel unoriginal. If the same
could go for a standard episode of, to keep the analogy going, Transparent or Girls, at least the people on-screen – a transgender parent and her
identity-conscious children in the former, a group of spoiled, creative
20-somethings in the latter – aren’t usually the ones front-and-center in the
stories we consume (or the worlds we live in). In Togetherness, it’s a suburban family doing fine with money,
contending with problems that are recognizable if not relatable to most
everyone. But even though the Duplass Brothers present a pretty-exclusively
white and heterosexual group of characters, the perspective is still as
“insider” as is the Jewishness of Transparent
or the hipsterism of Girls.
In
that way, investment is everything. As I described them before, this is a cast
of people taken very seriously, and sympathized with greatly, by the show’s
creators. How you react to Togetherness,
then, depends on whether you can fall on their side. Storytellers have to meet
you halfway, give you reasons to relate and connect and invest; but when the
nature of the material is this specific and this naturalistic, there’s an
element of insider knowledge that has to come into play. It’s the kind of idea
that has so severely plagued Looking,
a show which delves into a very specific part of the gay community, in the
ratings.
The
season finale gently fissures its two central relationships. The budding
attraction between Steve (Steve Zissis) and Tina (Amanda Peet) was never meant
to be – despite the obvious connection and affection shared, he’s just not the
kind of guy she could ever take seriously (because, mostly, she doesn’t take
herself seriously enough) – while the distancing marriage of Michelle (Melanie
Lynskey) and Brett (Mark Duplass) appears to be headed for a reconciliation
before a tragic season-ending development. A lot of it is left unfinished, and
there’s still a second season (and likely more) to go, but the damage is
irreparable: Steve goes to shoot a film in New Orleans, while, just as Brett
prepares to profess his newfound commitment to the marriage, Michelle gives in
to her attraction to David (John Ortiz). The final montage in particular hit me
much stronger than I expected; the show is so casually involving that only when
a game-changing development took place did it occur to me how much I’d come to
identify with these characters, and invest in their relationships.
A
lot of this has to do with the attention paid to each individual character.
Michelle, specifically, is so far away from the unfulfilled domestic that could
have been. Togetherness, over four
hours, invites us to see many facets of her character, from her not-so-lonely
night on the town to her fight for a community charter school. And though
initially introduced as the wife-that-doesn’t-want-to-have-sex, the story
unfolds in a way where she and Brett are equally complicit and equally guilty
about their struggle to maintain intimacy. The study here is equal among
characters, in the simultaneous pursuit of individual dreams and familial
responsibility and subsequent gratification. The casting, particularly of the
two female leads, has helped things out enormously. The show’s tracking of
Michelle’s crisis of identity, or Tina’s crisis of confidence, has been aided
by Lynskey’s conveyance of soft-spoken strength and Peet’s shaky but spirited
performance. As the episodes roll on, Lynskey and Peet come to be so
comfortable and so deep into their characters that it’s hard not to feel
them.
Which
leads me to the series’ climactic event: an act of infidelity. It’s not
unexpected, nor is it original to Togetherness.
But the execution is markedly different. The time we’ve spent with Michelle
individually leads to us practically rooting for her to sleep with David (though
partly because John Ortiz is, let’s get real, quite the charmer); there’s a
general question as to what would make her happy, which the show effectively
builds around, and she’s been reluctant enough to demonstrate a genuine
internal conflict. Yet when Brett has his little breakthrough, the sensation
turns the exact opposite: in a rich bout of dramatic irony, we make the
emotional (and moral) shift at the exact moment Michelle does, but just before
the Duplass team throws a clever switcheroo. By the time Brett is driving to
find her, and Michelle is closing in on spending the night with David, the
dynamics are so messy and the simple question of “what’s best?” so confusing
that we can only watch with our heartbeats a little faster and a little louder.
Here, Togetherness put its money
where its mouth is: it rallied us to its side, as we rooted helplessly and
unknowingly for a group of irritable, decent and completely familiar human
beings. That’s special. And it’s also, regardless of how conversant we may
think ourselves to be in such matters, undeniably unique.
Grade: A-