A clear casualty of the current, oversaturated market for television content, the abrupt cancellation of HBO’s Togetherness speaks volumes.
The pay cabler announced last week that it was cutting the cord on Mark and Jay Duplass’ sophomore series, which tracks four middle-aged adults looking for meaning in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The show was a consistent ratings disappointment and, despite strong production values and a pair of standout performances, failed to gain any awards traction. But this should have hardly come as a surprise to HBO; Togetherness was all but pitched as the low-key indie project destined for a cozy spot under-the-radar. Indeed, the network has provided a home for dozens of short-lived series that fit such a bill: Enlightened, Looking, Getting On and The Comeback, among others.
But Togetherness never aroused passion as those aforementioned series did. Critical reception was positive, but modest; its season two Metacritic score of 73 was significantly lower than what’s typical of the niche HBO half-hour. And its journey to the end diverged from where shows of its ilk have gone before. With the fates of Enlightened and Looking similarly uncertain as their second seasons progressed, critics came out in droves for each – among this decade’s bubble-laden series, Enlightened particularly received what might go down as the most robust-yet-unsuccessful “save this show” campaign – albeit to no avail. Both were canceled after their seasons concluded. Getting On, on the strength of increased visibility and surprise awards attention for star Niecy Nash, was offered a third (and predetermined final) season for closure. The Comeback premiered way back in 2005, but developed a fanbase loud enough in the decade to follow that a belated second season was ordered, and a third appears on the horizon.
Togetherness is notably anomalous, in the sense that its cancellation was inelegantly announced mid-season. That fact is representative of a major shift in HBO’s PR culture, one that doesn’t even provide the pretense of careful deliberation. Therein lies the implication that there was no reason to wait around – that there was no mob of critics or fans preparing to launch a thinkpiece assault or Twitter offensive. Of the more relevant pieces on Togetherness to circulate in the past month, Indiewire’s Ben Travers submitted a provocative proposal: that HBO would be far better off releasing the season in its entirety, all-at-once, Netflix-style. The show’s serialized structure was certainly conducive to that model of release, but the suggestion reeked of patchwork. After all, HBO had so little inclination to keep Togetherness around – it lacked the critical acclaim of, say, The Leftovers, a show of similar awards and commercial disappointment that was nonetheless revived in the winter – that fans weren’t even given a late-in-the-game chance to make its case.
Despite the positive notices, many critics have lamented Togetherness’ existence among the slew of overwhelmingly white, barely funny L.A. indie-coms sweeping through the cable and streaming worlds. It might not be fair to so easily lump-in the Duplass’ series, which at its best offers a distinctly scintillating look at adulthood, but it remains somewhat telling that a show preaching specificity and intimacy could be criticized for relative familiarity. Shows like Enlightened and Getting On could be just as divisive, but were never met with any pushback on such blasé grounds.
This is, partly, a game of increased expectations. Togetherness’ fate – and more importantly, the delivery of its fate – was a consequence of one of contemporary television’s most delicious ironies: the staleness of the “specific” series. Netflix’s So-Cal duo of Love, a romantic serial starring Gillian Jacobs, and Flaked, a beach hangout comedy from Will Arnett, landed with a collective thud over the winter, while in the drama department, the news was not good for HBO’s Vinyl, a languid retread of the prestige antihero drama. These established networks have continued to bank on overworked formulas that they’d galvanized the industry with just a few years ago; in turn, genre shake-ups from distributors like Hulu (Casual, a better L.A. indie-com), Lifetime (UnREAL, a feminist spin on the anti-hero trope) and USA Network (Mr. Robot, turning dozens of conventions on their head) feel innovative and fresh, if still flawed, by comparison. With Togetherness, HBO leaned on what's succeeded in the past. The show worked as a small collection of well-observed personal stories, but aesthetically and comically, it lacked bite.
This does not mean to say that breaking from the pack is a requisite for standing out. The greater problem for Togetherness was that it was unwaveringly good-not-great; alongside others in its milieu, like the profound Casual or bracing Transparent, it was a moody series blunted by uneven storytelling. The introduction of the Duplass Brothers – who, while quality directors, have really made their imprint through producing gigs on ambitious projects like Tangerine – to television would ordinarily feel exciting enough on its own. That the episodic format fit so organically with their cinematic rhythms – and that the show itself wound up so pleasant and clever – would seem the icing on the cake. But as HBO learned years ago with Christopher Guest and Family Tree, a merely fair film-to-television transition can no longer cut it.
Togetherness’ placement opposite Girls this spring has contributed to that sense of untenable mildness. Now in its fifth year, Lena Dunham’s ever-controversial millennial comedy is in many ways a shell of its groundbreaking initial self. It came onto the scene as something radically different, and has since eased into an uncomfortable past-its-prime veteran’s space. But Dunham is still trying new things, still pushing her narrative in complex directions – to the point where this past week, she pulled off one of the best episodes in Girls’ history. That’s a substantial accomplishment. In contrast, each episode of Togetherness has marginally pushed out its three or four mini-story-arcs, without an ounce of formal audacity or structural unpredictability. Again, the Duplass Brothers need not break form to get better, or more impactful. But when overly-invested in the acting career of Alex (Steve Zissis) or the charter school dilemma of Michelle (the great Melanie Lynskey), they can get a little too comfortable in their bubble of story conflict. These stories don’t compel the emotion or intrigue necessary to justify such a suffocating focus on L.A. minutiae, no matter how greatly the performances from Lynskey or the extraordinary Amanda Peet elevate the material.
This is, as ever, an interesting time for television. The demands are changing, the standards shifting – and for HBO and other premium cable networks, the space between critical acclaim and awards success is widening. For such established networks, “good” therefore isn’t always enough anymore – not without big ratings (as HBO gets with Ballers) or a clear cultural impact (Girls), at least. And that’s what ultimately did the Duplass Brothers' small-screen foray in. They did something admirable, in ably making the transition from movies to television – from a ninety-minute story to one that knows no time limit. They created a show that I’ll miss some, but also one that never took the leap I’d hoped it would. In the end, Togetherness was good television – but it needed to be great.