AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Bridget everett man1/6/2024 ![]() The first couple of episodes are almost oppressively dark in how they put you inside Beth’s head to appreciate her utter ennui. Tonally, the show can be all over the map. An unexpected event forces Beth to re-examine everything and everyone that has brought her to this point, and to take a break from the city to spend time at her old Long Island stomping grounds in hopes of figuring out how she turned out this way. The reasoning is more complicated than that, as is the nature of Beth’s relationship with Jane, why Beth seems so uncomfortable around her mom, and why her younger sister, Ann (Susannah Flood), wants no part of Jane at all. Benanti and Schumer are basically the same age - at least Michael Rapaport, who plays her father, Leonard, in several episodes, is a decade older - and, at first, the casting feels like a broad joke about how old and tired Beth feels even as her mom is bouncing around like she’s still a young(ish) woman. That first episode also brings in Laura Benanti to play Beth’s mother Jane. (*) I suppose she could be playing a woman named “Life,” and the whole thing could be a buddy-cop satire - maybe co-starring Schumer’s old friend Bridget Everett in between making seasons of Somebody Somewhere, which shares comedian Murray Hill with this show - but that’s something else entirely. But she can’t understand why she’s so unhappy. She just keeps going along with the gig, with Matt, with all of it, simply because it’s the path of least resistance. The more she talks, the less enthusiastic she sounds about any of it. ![]() We’re introduced to her as she pitches some potential clients on buying her company’s wine, but soon she is pitching herself and her allegedly great existence, since it’s what they seem to want to hear. She lives in Manhattan, has been in a long-term relationship with the handsome Matt (Kevin Kane), and has a job as a wine distributor that gets her into all the fanciest restaurants in town. But Life & Beth is an interesting and ultimately sweet and likable tale, and a solid soft-relaunch of sorts for Schumer herself.Īs the punny title suggests, Schumer plays a woman named Beth(*), whose life on paper seems enviable. Not all of those things work seamlessly with one another, and some of them don’t work at all. So while her new Hulu show Life & Beth - which she created, stars in, writes for, sometimes directs, and executive-produces - isn’t exactly a comeback vehicle, it does feel like a louder declaration that she’s entering a new phase of her career than, say, Amy Schumer Learns to Cook did.ĭespite telling a relatively small story, Life & Beth can at times feel guilty of trying to do too much, as if Schumer and her collaborators (including Inside Amy Schumer director Ryan McFaul) want to showcase everything she’s still capable of since she was last in the spotlight, as well as demonstrate new skills she’s picked up along the way. She hardly vanished, yet she wasn’t as present in the zeitgeist as she had been in the Comedy Central days. And in the show’s masterpiece, an episode-length parody of Twelve Angry Men where the jurors argued over whether Schumer was attractive enough to have her own TV show, it did all those things at once.Īfter the series ended, Schumer starred in some more movies, co-hosted a pandemic cooking show with her chef husband Chris Fischer, and appeared in a documentary series about her latest comedy tour coinciding with a difficult pregnancy. (Josh Charles came in for note-perfect spoofs of both Friday Night Lightsand The Newsroom, the latter “bestowed upon you by Aaron Sorkin.”) It dug deep on the strange and terrible ways society could view women, or that women could view themselves, whether in the implied homoeroticism of men’s fascination with “chicks who can hang,” or the way that women are conditioned to view getting fat as the worst societal sin they could commit. Her Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer wickedly parodied the television of the day. For a few years in the mid-2010s, Amy Schumer was as prominent and acclaimed a comic voice as there was to be found anywhere in American pop culture.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |