They’ll figure it out, maybe: Thoughts on Unstable (season 1)

(courtesy IMP Awards)

There’s a moment when you’re watching the trailer for a promising sitcom, full of wry dialogue, sparkling quips and deliciously good comic timing that you hope and pray to whatever streaming gods are out there, that the resultant program will be every bit as good as its teaser taster suggests.

Alas, that’s not always the case and what looked endlessly hilarious in bite-sized chunks can end up looking and sounding wan and strung out in a much bigger, episodes-long setting.

Thankfully, Unstable, newly-released to the bingeable masses on Netflix, ducks and weaves with incredible comic smarts around this eventuality, delivering up a short, sharp, eight-episode season that is, if anything, funnier than its highly engaging trailer already suggests.

Helping things along considerably is the fact that the writing is GOOD, and stays good right throughout the season, even when different writers are involved, a sign that while individual talents might be at work that here is a writing with a collective vision that they seamlessly manage to deliver on.

It’s well-nigh impossible to do justice to the bon mots, lively quips and quirkily surreal jabs of great hilarity that joyfully puncture just about every scene of Unstable which holds its oddball premise close right from the get-go, refusing to relinquish it for anyone.

The show is, in many ways, a celebration of the odd ones out, the people who, because they are intensely smart or myopically interested in a certain topic or just plain socially awkward, or in the case of the lead protagonist, Ellis Dragon (Rob Lowe) who is in sterling form, all three, don’t quite make it out in the big, bard world.

Or rather they do, and again Ellis is exhibit A, running his own super successful techno-science company that’s on the verge, if only their chief scientist would just concentrate (there’s a heartrending reason why he isn’t and it’s mostly well explored), of turning greenhouse gases into concrete which will save the world!

And, rather happily for Elli’s board and investors, make a lot of people of lot of very shiny money.

But that’s only if Ellis, mourning the loss of his much-loved wife who was one of the people who unquestionably accepted him for who he weirdly is – the other is his CFO, Anna (Sian Clifford) who writes office fan fiction in secret, or possibly not-so-secret, and who’s the queen of the witty aside and clever observation – can get back to his doing what he does best which is breaking down the walls to the next big, unthought-of thing.

This is where his estranged son Jackson (Lowe’s real life son John Owen Lowe) comes in; dragged back to California from New York where he has a less-than-successful career as a flautist – he’s a trained, super-smart engineer but gave it up as part of his rejection of his dad’s attempt to turn him into a mini-me with no regard for who Jackson actually is – he’s supposed to be the one to take over from his mum and centre his dad again, a task which has renewed weight and importance when Dragon’s board threatens to remove hok from his own company.

Cue all kinds of riotously fun father-son bonding, or initially at least not-so bonding, with Jackson, who finds himself happily drawn back into science working with Luna (Rachel Marsh) and Ruby (Emma Ferreira), struggling with what it means to live in the shadow of a media sensation and famously quirky personality like Ellis.

While Unstable doesn’t spend a great deal of time on any kind of truly meaningful musing about why fathers and sons clash – it is a sitcom after all, and while it’s an intelligent cut above the genre pack, it’s there for the jokes, thank you and not the meditation on sociological conundrums – it’s still does a nice job of letting its characters be gloriously and appealing flawed and human.

Whether it’s the weird therapist Leslie (Fred Armisen) who has a wholly unhealthy and amusingly strange relationship with Ellis, or Malcolm (Aaron Branch), Jackson’s gay childhood friend who’s hilariously doing his best to act like he belongs in a corporate setting, or just about all the other characters who populate this slice of ensemble comedic perfection, Unstable celebrates everyone who never really fits in and who wonder where they will find their people.

It turns out, that longed-for place is in a successful but comedically dysfunctional company in California which stands on the cusp of even more greatness and financial success if it can just get its collective shit together.

Half the fun of Unstable is wondering if it will, in fact, live up to the promise of its constituent parts.

They are all enormously smart and insightful people, able to think up amazing twists and turns in scientific advancement at the drop of a pipette, but they really have a hard time grappling with what it means to be a day-to-day human falling in love, handling friendships and family relationships, and just trying to get through life.

Unlike some shows which almost make fun of being a nerd even as they sort of celebrate it – I love you but I’m looking at you The Big Bang TheoryUnstable lovingly and affectionately celebrates what it means to not handle the mainstream commonalities of life as well as you’d like to and to simply chalk it up the quite ordinary business of being human.

The sitcom LOVES its characters and draws much of its humour from who these people are rather trying to make them fit stereotypes and cliches which, while they may be a source of quick, easy jokes, seldom lead to any sort of long-run sustainable comedy.

You can only hope that Unstable, which glories happily and approvingly in the oddity, strangeness and weird lovability of its beautifully grounded and flawed characters who can push the boundaries of science but no idea what to do on a date, gets a long-term run at being intelligently and at times movingly funny (it’s takes on grief on brief but effectively insightful) because it knows what to do with its setting and its quirky inhabitants and to make some clever points into the bargain and you can only hope that its fulfillment of its rich trailer promise gets a health chance to prove that being odd is actually a pretty cool and winningly human thing to be.

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