Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Platonic’ On Apple TV+, Where Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne Are Former Best Friends Who Reconnect After A Rift

Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen have done the marriage thing already, at least on screen: They played a married couple in the two Neighbors films. Now they’re going to play two former besties who rekindle their friendship, much to the discomfort of everyone around them, in a new Apple comedy.

PLATONIC: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a typical suburban home, a family gets ready to have family movie night, but everyone wants to watch something different.

The Gist: As Sylvia (Rose Byrne), her husband Charlie (Luke Macfarlane) and their three kids argue about which movie to watch, Sylvia gets an email that mentions that her old friend Will (Seth Rogen) is getting a divorce. Sylvia and Will used to be best friends, but five years ago they had a falling out when she told him that he shouldn’t marry the wife he’s now divorcing. Charlie encourages her to call him.

While she thinks it’s going to be awkward, she calls him to meet for coffee. She’s right that the meeting is awkward; she feigns surprise about the divorce, and he doesn’t react at all to a picture of her kids. Still, he invites her to a party at his brewpub that weekend, more out of politeness than anything else.

While standing at school drop off with her divorced friend Katie (Carla Gallo), Sylvia laments that it feels like her life has just boiled down to her kids over the last 13 years, and with her youngest now in kindergarten, she wants to use the extra time for herself. The two of them decide to go to the brewpub, especially because Katie hasn’t gotten laid in a long time.

At the brewpub, both women feel completely out of place, and they’re about to leave when they see Will having a confrontation with his ex-wife, with whom he’s supposedly having an amicable divorce. She brought a date to the pub and Will goes off on them both. When Sylvia console him after the confrontation, it kicks off a night of drinking, hashing out why their friendship busted up, some gummies, consuming of a lot of French fries at Denny’s, and a face-off with a Doberman at a pawn shop. The friendship is officially rekindled, even when Sylvia reveals that she called him after finding out about the divorce.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The “men and women can’t/can be friends” debate that we see in Platonic is mostly associated with When Harry Met Sally, which is mentioned when Will says to his business partners Andy (Tre Hale) and Reggie (Andrew Lopez) that he invited Sylvia to the bar.

Our Take: The first episode of Platonic, created by Nick Stoller and Francesca Delbanco, is a bumpy ride, mainly because we don’t buy for a minute that Sylvia and Will were ever friends, much less inseparable BFFs. Perhaps that’s by design, but there were some plot points in the first episode that didn’t mesh with what we were seeing on screen.

We don’t know much about the backstory of their friendship, what made them so compatible and why they never took things the extra step and fostered a romantic relationship. What we do know is that Sylvia is a cardigan-wearing mother of three who wants to actually use her law degree after being a stay-at-home-mother for thirteen years, and Will is a tattoo-covered hipster manchild who more or less acts the same way he did in college.

So, it stands to reason that maybe the two of them were best buds in college and maybe a little afterwards, but once Sylvia and Charlie started a family, their lives diverged to the point where they might friend each other on Facebook or occasionally text each other a link to something funny. Yet their friendship only melted down five years ago, when Sylvia’s youngest was either a baby or still in the womb. It’s hard for us to believe they had that much in common at that point, so it’s hard for us to believe that her opinion on his fiancée would have held that much weight.

It’s why we need some context, to see if Sylvia was as immature as Will at some point during their friendship to show how good of a match they were. The idea of this show is that the two of them are going to end up spending so much time together after rekindling their friendship that things are going to get uncomfortable for their friends and families. But without an idea of why the two of them were so close to begin with, we’ll be constantly wondering just what the two of them see in the other to want to be around each other so much.

What’s also odd is that you’d think we’d want to see more of Rogen being brotastic with his brewpub buddies, making pop culture jokes. But we’d actually rather see Byrne chafing against being a 40-year-old mom who has put her wishes and desired aside for over a decade in order to raise her family. Yes, it’s a well-worn plot, but Byrne was infinitely funnier in her solo scenes than Rogen was in his, and when Rogen was on screen we just wanted to go back to Byrne and her story.

Then again, perhaps the fact that the characters are such an odd pairing will work eventually, with each of them fulfilling a need that the other has. It’s just not in evidence in the first episode, even if Byrne and Rogen have good chemistry together when their characters are in friendship mode.

Sex and Skin: Will talks about a spot on his back that would make him finish quickly when his ex would punch it, so Sylvia tries it with Charlie, who likes to go slow in bed.

Parting Shot: Through the windows of their bedrooms, we see Sylvia and Will texting each other after it seemed like they ended the night on bad terms.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Luke Macfarlane as Charlie, because we agree with him about not wanting to see The Emoji Movie for the umpteenth time.

Most Pilot-y Line: The Denny’s product placement was pretty obvious, especially when there was more than one shot of the entire exterior of a Denny’s restaurant as Sylvia and Will argued outside.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Platonic may be one of those rare cases where the first episode is not an indication of how the rest of the season is going to go. But we not only found the friendship at the show’s center a bit hard to believe but we were surprised at how unfunny Rogen’s half of the story actually was.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.