It happens too often: a TV series is cancelled right as it feels as though it’s finding its feet and its audience.
In the case of Crashing – the HBO show produced by Judd Apatow that fictionalises the personal and professional life of comedian Pete Holmes (not the Phoebe Waller-Bridge show of the same name) – the show was bold, touching and genuinely funny from the beginning, and was cancelled right as Holmes’ on-screen self finally hit his stride in his career.
It might have been disappointing to see it end there, but Crashing was always a show about false starts, opportunities that aren’t as promising as they seem, and brutally humiliating disappointments.
Raised as a God-fearing Christian, Holmes married his first wife in his early 20s and planned to become a youth pastor. Holding a mic in front of audiences gave way to his real passion: standup comedy. He began earnestly pursuing the very ungodly goal of getting on stage at dank comedy clubs. Around the same time he discovered his wife was cheating on him and their marriage fell apart.
All of this was material ripe for the picking on his long-running interview podcast You Made it Weird, but Holmes smartly expanded his autobiographical misadventures on Crashing and built around them a world of characters – and fellow comics also playing versions of themselves.
The tone and style of the show owes more than a little to since-disgraced comedian Louis CK’s FX show, Louie. But narratively, the comparisons begin and end at “divorced comedians working clubs in New York City”. It’s the pursuit not of success but slow, painful progress that fuels the character of Pete. It’s tragic watching him barking (the term for handing out comedy show flyers to tourists on the street in the hope of earning time on the club’s stage) and warming up the audiences for daytime talk shows – and even more tragic to see how good he is at it; how much these small, sad wins build his confidence and get him closer to his goal.
Watching him return to a state of adolescence – working at a yoghurt shop and crashing at his girlfriend’s place – it can be hard to remember that all of this is in pursuit of something the 30-something Pete wants. His old life, with a wife and house and stable responsibilities, didn’t serve him. He walked away from it all to be not-a-great-standup, but all his stumbles help him to eventually get upright.
In between hanging out with troubled comic Artie Lange, crashing on Sarah Silverman’s couch (the show sweetly portrays her as the mother hen of these disastrous adult men, and her home as the land of misfit toy comedians), and falling in and out of a relationship with another comic, Pete tries out the college circuit before, in season three, earning a spot on a Christian variety show. He’s a hit, and is finally making good money from comedy – but it requires compromise he isn’t willing to make.
Pete returns to New York City, where the booker of the Comedy Cellar has rejected him and his new, terrifyingly supportive girlfriend has broken up with him. But by then he’s reached a place where he doesn’t totally crumble at the prospect.
Over three seasons, Holmes excavated the narcissism and hopelessness of the working comic, crafted tender and thoughtful commentary on religion, and fearlessly examined the horror and ugliness under the mask of the sweet, hapless nice guy. And he made it all, somehow, funny.
“He’s worked hard, he deserves this,” Holmes tells himself in the mirror as he prepares for his biggest gig yet: opening for John Mulaney at Town Hall. He’s done it. Except, of course, he hasn’t really. Where they take the final episode of Crashing is a masterclass in tragicomedy. And despite Holmes, Apatow and Crashing’s writers planning for a fourth season, by the time the camera pans away from Pete one last time, things are finally looking hopeful. If they made more episodes of Crashing, we’d inevitably watch it all fall apart – but for now we can just pretend.
• Crashing is streaming in Australia on Binge
