In Platonic, Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play characters who try to rekindle an old friendship after their adult lives take them in different very directions. Photo / Philip Cheung, The New York Times
The new Apple TV+ comedy, starring Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, proposes an atypical answer to the question of the When Harry Met Sally conundrum.
About 20 years ago, the husband-and-wife writing and directing team of Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco went to a joint bachelor-bachelorette party in Las Vegas. Delbanco knew the bride-to-be a little, but the bachelor had been a close friend since college.
The parties peeled off — the men to a steakhouse, the women to get sushi. Delbanco found herself rolling almost involuntarily with the bachelorette group.
“I went with her, but I was there not because I had known her — I was there because I was a friend of his,” Delbanco recalled in a recent video interview. “I remember thinking, ‘Why does it have to be that way?’”
The incident gnawed at her over the years, until she finally decided to address it in her work. Platonic, the new Apple TV+ limited series created by Delbanco and Stoller and starring Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen (who are also executive producers), playfully asks a timeless question: Why is it so difficult for people — especially married people — to maintain friendships with members of the opposite sex?
Platonic, which premiered on May 24, isn’t a “will they or won’t they” romantic comedy like When Harry Met Sally, which is less about staying friends than about falling in love. It’s the story of Sylvia (Byrne), a happily married but slightly bored woman, who tries to rekindle a friendship with Will (Rogen), a middle-aged man-child going through a painful divorce. Sylvia and Will used to hang out, partying and laughing but never sleeping together. They eventually went their separate ways, largely because Sylvia didn’t care for Will’s wife. Now Will is back, lonely and a bit needy.
He is ready to resume the party. He is also passively dismissive of Sylvia’s family life, with her extremely nice, extremely handsome husband (Luke Macfarlane) and their three kids.
Sylvia, meanwhile, has a hard time taking Will seriously. He is a hipster brewery owner with a young girlfriend and an aversion to selling out and settling down. But Will’s footloose ways also make Sylvia look back and wonder where the years have gone. Platonic isn’t just a tale of friendship; it’s also a front-row seat to duelling, colliding midlife crises.
The series reunites Byrne and Rogen, stars of the 2014 comedy Bad Neighbours, directed by Stoller, about a young married couple living next door to a bunch of raucous frat boys. This time, however, their characters are in conflicting places in their lives.
“I think my character is self-destructive in a lot of ways and immature in a lot of ways, and really trying to live a life that is just not the life someone his age should be living anymore,” Rogen said in a joint video interview with Byrne. “In his perspective, he’s just not shackled by this thing that she’s shackled by. So her judgment of him is confusing because he’s like: ‘Well, who cares? I don’t have a kid and a spouse.’”
For her part, Sylvia is “a responsible and extremely high-functioning achiever”, as Byrne described it, “one of those sorts of characters who can do it all.
“Those people are intimidating. And then on the flip side of it, she can really party.”
In one episode, Sylvia throws Will a divorce party, inviting all of his friends to a swanky dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. The guys want to go to a strip club after dinner; Sylvia is resistant, which annoys Will. “Fun has changed for me,” she tells Will. “It has evolved into something else.” Will’s rebuttal: “Your fun has evolved into something called ‘not fun.’” Then they end up doing CK, a mix of cocaine and ketamine, giving Byrne a chance to show off her physical comedy chops as she stumbles through the rest of the evening.
The episode illustrates Sylvia’s dilemma. Part of her wants to be irresponsible, to shuck off her outwardly ideal life, her mum and wife duties, if only for a moment.
“It’s a constant push and pull,” said Byrne, who has two children with actor Bobby Cannavale. Sylvia was once a promising lawyer, but gave up her career to have a family. “You do feel a sense of loss and grief and weird disorientation if you have been the primary caregiver for so long, and that is where she’s at,” Byrne added. “Then she’s at this crossroad when she reunites with Will, and it sends her off on a little spiral.”
Both parties have confidants and protectors. Sylvia’s best friend is Katie (Carla Gallo, who also worked with Byrne in Bad Neighbours). Katie is a bit more forgiving than Will’s younger friend and business partner, Andy (Tre Hale), who is both frustrated with Will’s pious attitude and suspicious of Sylvia’s sudden reemergence in Will’s life.
“There’s a beef there, with Andy wanting to make sure Sylvia is not coming in and messing with my dude’s head because he already has a bunch of stuff on his plate,” said Hale, a formidable former UCLA football player. “He is annoyed that he has to be the big brother in the situation, especially as it pertains to the bar and the business.”
The first time audiences saw Rogen and Byrne together onscreen, in Bad Neighbours, their characters were having furious, comical sex as their infant child sneaked a peek. In Platonic, however, the sexual chemistry is nil by design; you never really ask yourself if Will and Sylvia will fall into bed together. She has issues with Charlie, her lawyer husband, who is the opposite of a wild and crazy guy, but she isn’t about to cheat on him.
As Stoller put it, “Everything’s either sex or murder in TV and movies, and we don’t have either.”
There is, however, jealousy. Sylvia is a little jealous of Will’s freedom. Will is a little jealous of Sylvia’s loving, supportive home life. And Charlie is a little jealous of this wisecracking arrested-development case partying with his wife — Charlie’s work friends start referring to Will as “your wife’s boyfriend” — which sets up some rich comic possibilities.
“The central joke there is that Luke is so good-looking,” Stoller said of Macfarlane. “He looks like a god, you know?”
Delbanco added: “And Will is a wreck. His life is in shambles, and he’s got this crazy midlife crisis, and he’s bleaching his hair. There’s something so great about the most solid, handsome, upstanding man in the world being somehow undone by what he perceives as this threat to his marriage.”
It all circles back to the main question: can a woman and a man — a straight woman and man, anyway — maintain a close friendship?
Delbanco recalled another Las Vegas story, this one more recent. Shortly before the pandemic, she spent a weekend there with two straight, married guy friends. “It was really fun, and I don’t think Nick was thinking, ‘Why are you in Las Vegas with those friends?’” she said. “We just had a great time, but a lot of people were like, ‘Wait, where is your husband?’”
Stoller recalled the weekend from his end. “My friends kept asking, ‘Where’s your wife?’” he said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, she’s in Vegas with two of her guy friends.’ The near-universal response: ‘What? Really?’”
The common expectation for such friendships is that the parties have either had sex or will have sex (or that one of them was relegated to the Friend Zone). Byrne has a close male friend, an old room-mate with whom she still likes to socialise, and many of her friends can’t believe they never slept together. “It is a constant source of amusement and fascination for me,” Byrne said of her friends’ incredulity. “That was one of the reasons I was drawn to the series.”
In the end, perhaps the friendship issue boils down to the question of what it means to be a grown-up. The roads can narrow when you start a family, or immerse yourself in a career, or both. What once seemed like a routine social relationship starts to draw raised eyebrows. There were fewer rules when Will and Sylvia were tearing it up as 20-somethings.
Years later, they have embraced different versions of adulthood. There’s a wistful quality to their rekindled friendship, something that represents times both wilder and more innocent. “They used to go out really late and get into all kinds of adventures and crazy shenanigans that are less and less available to you when you’re in your 40s and parents and that kind of stuff,” Delbanco said. “That’s some of the pleasure that they take in each other.
“The question becomes, is there a way to incorporate that into your adult life without messing up the rest of it?”
Platonic is available to stream on Apple TV+
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Chris Vognar
Photographs by: Philip Cheung
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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