Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen make Platonic worth spending time with, especially when its reunited friends get on each other’s nerves. The broader antics repeat themselves, and the supporting characters cannot quite compete.
Platonic has a sensible idea about friendship: adults can need each other badly without needing to sleep together. Its first series brings old friends Sylvia and Will back into each other’s lives in middle age, when a reunion can remind people of everything they expected to have sorted out. Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen make the arrangement funny enough to forgive a fair amount of familiar trouble. We recommend it for their company, with some patience required for the repeated bouts of misbehaviour.
Byrne’s Sylvia and Rogen’s Will are convincing as people who know how to amuse each other and exactly how to be a nuisance. Neither performer seems obliged to make the friendship look improving, which is a relief. We laughed at their readiness to insult each other; Byrne and Rogen deliver the insults with the ease of an old routine. Their conversations sound agreeably free of the effort to appear sensible that can make adult socialising such hard work.
Writers Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco are good at letting an affectionate conversation become uncomfortable. An old friend can encourage habits that everyone else has reasonably asked us to abandon. Sylvia and Will’s closeness gives them ample opportunity to indulge each other, and the writing recognises how quickly that can become unhelpful. The dialogue is often sharp enough to make their attachment understandable even when their conduct is wearing, and both actors are persuasive in those exchanges.
John Guleserian’s cinematography and Theresa Guleserian’s production design make less impression than the performances; our attention stays firmly with the two leads. Michael Andrews’s music likewise remains secondary to the rhythms of their conversation. That is a reasonable balance for a comedy so dependent on the pleasure of listening to people talk, though the programme offers fewer pleasures when the dialogue slackens. The brisk pace helps the jokes, but there could be more scrutiny of how much these comfortable adults really have to complain about.
The difficulty is that the stories around the friendship are less absorbing than the friendship itself. Supporting characters rarely offer an equally strong reason to stay, while the broader escapades keep returning to the pleasure of watching adults behave badly. The writing too often lets that behaviour substitute for a fresh joke. A little more restraint would help, particularly when the series asks for sympathy for troubles these friends are quite capable of causing themselves.
The decision to avoid the usual romantic suspense gives Platonic room to consider why maintaining a friendship can matter so much. Its characters want reassurance, attention and permission to be foolish from a person who remembers them. The programme is at its most touching when it allows that need to seem slightly embarrassing. Byrne and Rogen are good at suggesting how much these two get from being together, even during their more exasperating exchanges.
Try an episode before making an evening of it. Enjoying Platonic depends on liking Sylvia and Will enough to forgive them for carrying on, and the actors make a good case for doing so. Anyone hoping for quiet, sensible middle-aged companionship should arrange something else.
