LOOT (S2, E1-5)
It’s a pretty much a given that Maya Rudolph can do no wrong and with stellar writing back her and surrounded by a very talented ensemble cast, she’s one of those performers who is a comedic delight in just about every way possible. In Loot season one we saw just how good she can be, with the talented Saturday Night Live alum exceling as Molly Wells, a billionaire’s wife done wrong who, after discovering her husband is cheating on her and leaving their marriage, has to decide what on earth she’s going to do with the rest of her life. Forward direction comes in the form of a foundation in her name which has been working, without her knowledge (but then she’s all about lounging by the pool, cocktails and fashion, not philanthropy), under the careful stewardship of Sofia (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez) who is everything Milly is not. Season did a beautiful job of introducing Molly, Sofia and her team, imbuing them with idiosyncratic wit but also some real, affecting humanity. It was a winning approach with Molly growing and changing into someone who’s not as selfish as she once was and who pledges to give away all $120 billion in her care.
Season two picks up with Molly more grounded but thankfully not too grounded with the newly-minted philanthropist and her hilarious vapid assistant Nicholas (Joel Kim Booster) still capable of disappearing into a lifestyle that is so removed from what most of us know as normal that it takes tens of staff members to run it. Molly is far from being an everyday gal, but thankfully Loot doesn’t need to be completely off the billionaire wagon, since much of the writing pivots off the absurdity of the lifestyle she leads and how even in her reformed phase, she can be gleefully out of touch. What makes Loot season two, which moves into much more of an ensemble feel with characters like Ainsley (Stephanie Styles), Howard (Run Funches) and Arthur (Nat Faxon), who is back to being close to winning Molly’s heart, give a lot more narrative time. Even good old Nicholas is fleshed out rather movingly, emblematic of a show that treats its characters seriously and which doesn’t exploit them to make a laugh, rather letting the comedy flow from who they are. It’s a sophisticated approach that grounds all the characters in such a way that no matter how off-the-charts loopy things get, and they do go to some weirdly funny places, that we never lose sight that here are real people caught up in the absurdity of life. All of that makes for some very satisfying comedy and moments that are actually quite moving and sweet with Loot right up there with classic sitcoms like Frasier which balance hilarity and humanity to perfection. Season two keeps the quality and the laughs coming, proof that you can advance your character and plot without discarding the very thing that made the sitcom funny in the first place.
Loot streams on AppleTV+
What exactly happened in season ? Why, thanks for asking …
NOT DEAD YET (S2, E1-5)
(courtesy IMP Awards)
Not Dead Yet is one of those sitcoms that doesn’t exactly reinvent the artform as it does make the most of it and pretty much do what’s been done before. Having said that, there are plenty of anodyne sitcoms that have ticked all the right boxes and still come across lacking in heart, substance and most importantly, any sense of fun or comedy. Thankfully while Not Dead Yet is not exactly an innovator or an occupant of the top tier of the sitcom genre, it offers a great deal to like, all of which is on show in season two which pretty keeps the wheels of season one turning over again, albeit with some reasonably weighty fleshing out of previously cardboard cutout characters such as the editor-in-chief, Alexis (Lauren Ash) of the “sit” part of the show, a newspaper called the SoCal Independent. She is the boss of the show’s highly sweet and eminently likeable protagonist Nell Serrano (Gina Rodriguez) who, like the subject of the book on which the show is based, Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up by Alexandra Potter, is struggling to rebuild a once-promising journalistic career after she left the U.S. to head to the U.K. for what turned out to be a disastrously short relationship with the man she was supposed to marry.
While Not Dead Yet is essentially a long line of workplace sitcoms filled with wacky characters and absurdist situations – in one episode, two floors are combined into one to encourage colleague intimacy but it goes badly wrong in a way that only a slightly surrealist sitcom can manage – its big claim to fame is that Nell can talk to the dead who are the subjects of the obits she has to write as her reentry job back into the world of investigative journalism. They honestly don’t anything that extraordinary and are assigned simply to giving Nell life advice that will help her on her 21-miunute life-issue way but they add a little extra something to the sitcom which can be quite affecting in its own light, brief way. Take episode two of the season, “Not a Valentine Yet”, in which Nell hits it off with a handsome guy, Andres (Tommy Martinez) who, it turns out (yay plot contrivance!), is the son of her current obit subject Senator Diana Fernandez (Lidia Porto) and who is mired in a grief that’s expressed in the middle of an obviously OTT plot. This episode had the potential to be just played for strangely cross-eyed laughs, and while it’s hardly a dramatic tour de force, it carries more emotional weight that you might otherwise expect. A deep dive into the human psyche it is not but Not Dead Yet excels by giving us lovably good characters who increasingly care for each other and are being ever-so-slightly-and-slowly fleshed out and who, as well as being divertingly funny, make watching these episodes like getting for twenty minutes by very close friends … and honestly, that’s no bad thing.
Not Dead Yet streams on Disney+
Want a sneak peek? You got it …