Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
At long last, Generation X, the best generation ever, is asking the key question that has plagued our collective psyche for decades: Why aren’t we getting laid more? By the time the boomers were our age, they were balls-deep into their third marriages. We missed the era of free love and the era of hookup culture. Instead, we had divorce trauma and AIDS scares, and so we retreated into perma-marriage, relatively young. Now, finally, our writer types are pondering if there might be other fish in the basket.
There were early murmurs of this in Little Children, but suddenly there’s a universal sigh going out at the faded possibility of diddling the neighbor astride the washing machine. Everyone wants one last shot, in the immortal words of Cy Tolliver, at an “interesting piece of strange”. It’s been building for a while on our teevees, with the Duplass Brothers’ half-hearted thrusting and Joe Swanberg’s couples who can only get it up if they’re dressed in Halloween costumes. And lately it’s been ramping: Naomi Watts plays a Gen-X therapist who gets involved with her patients in Gypsy, tapping into some sort of “deep erotic longing.” Matthew Klam’s first novel, and first book in nearly two decades, stars a frustrated cartoonist who feels the door closing on his libido and is having a fling with a sexy weird rich lady. Write what you know, after all. Or, in this case, write what you don’t.
With Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco’s Friends From College, Gen-X has achieved its peak moment of sexual dissatisfaction. Despite the title, it’s actually a show about something far more interesting than friends from college: An affair that’s been going on for 20 years. Unlike the affair in The Affair, this affair doesn’t find itself burdened by multiple timelines, flashbacks, shifting perspectives, and a dumb backstory about a rural family selling heroin. The Showtime affair may feature hotter sex scenes and lots of sobbing Ruth Wilson, but the affair in Friends From College feels like a real relationship between real lovers. Despite a seemingly infinite number of minor flaws, Friends From College actually achieves the impossible: It gets you to semi-root for people who have been ludicrously and blatantly cheating on their spouses for the entire length of their marriages. They are proxy-fucking for the rest of us.
Friends From College achieves the impossible: It gets you to semi-root for people who have been ludicrously and blatantly cheating on their spouses for the entire length of their marriages.
The show’s irresistible man-meat is, as always in shows like this, a writer. But unlike the complicated and brooding Noah Solloway on The Affair, Keegan-Michael Key’s performance is an absolute mess of ticks and dumb voices left over from discarded skits. He’s a cuck in wolf’s clothing, fuckable only because of celebrity reputation.
On the other hand, Annie Parisse is absolutely terrific as Key’s conflicted, rich lover. Despite Key’s schtickiness, at least some of his scenes with Parisse feel authentic. She can switch personalities in a gesture, wearing different masks for her husband and kids, her beleaguered employees, her questionable college friends, and even her therapist. But when she’s with Key, that mask drops, and she’s all self-doubt and authentic emotion. She’s doing something incredibly stupid, but can’t help herself. That’s very Gen-X. We don’t have the option of swiping left or swiping right, but we can definitely crash the car into a tree while we’re getting fingered after dropping the kids off at daycare.
Cobie Smulders, an actor with a decade of experience in anchoring a sitcom while egomaniacal male performers strut around her, is almost as good as Key’s wife. She literally smolders, kind of a neat trick. Their scenes together may not have as much depth as the ones between Key and Parisse, but they are believable, and often grimly funny. When Smulders finally cracks up after realizing what’s been going on, it makes sense, feels earned, and plays as sympathetic despite her own nasty behavior. She’s even more of a proxy for the audience, because she’s spent her entire life trying to play by the rules of monogamy, and it only leads her to neurotic ruin.
Friends from college are never interesting to anyone but those friends, and sometimes not even then. That’s certainly true in this show, which wastes plenty of time filming Fred Savage dancing around his literary agent’s office like a demented skunk ape. But while no one cares about the process of selling a novel except for novelists, everyone loves a good cheating story, especially in the age of Weiner. There’s more than a whiff of infidelity in the air as another generation starts its downward slope toward the grave. Friends From College acknowledges that fact, accepts it, and has the guts to portray it as unjudgmentally as possible. It’s not a particularly good show, but at least, and at last, it admits that there’s more to life than playing house.
Neal Pollack (@nealpollack) is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.
