What is it? A full-blown tension headache (or sitcom) in eight parts.
Why you’ll love it: If you have four hours to commit to a televisual arsehole safari, you will love Friends from College. If you want your heart broken by Nicholas Stoller, the guy who co-wrote Undeclared, the gloriously nuanced but criminally short-lived college comedy with Judd Apatow, step this way. It turns out he only writes arseholes now.
And so we find ourselves in bed with Ethan (Keegan-Michael Key) and Sam (Annie Parisse) who have been secretly banging for two decades, despite since marrying other people. When Ethan announces to Sam, post-bang, that he’s moving back to New York, she panics and ends it. But not for long.
Cut to Ethan and wife Lisa (Cobie Smulders) arriving in the city and moving in with other college friend Marianne (Jae Suh Park) who lets them sleep on her sofa because they are still looking for an apartment. They are also trying for a baby. On her sofa. The rest of the group is made up of Max (Fred Savage from The Wonder Years) and his boyfriend Felix (comedian Billy Eichner) who also happens to be Ethan and Sam’s fertility doctor. And spare part Nick (Nat Faxon), whose only character note is that he has a trust fund and shags young women.
Stoller has created and written the show with his wife, Francesca DelBanco, an actor with no previous writing credits. He is Harvard educated and must have brought some of his own experiences to bear in this Peter’s Friends set-up. But if he and his college mates are really like this, I despair for them all.
The fundamental comedy writing basics have been kicked aside here to allow for the dreadful, inexplicable behaviour of the characters. Would this man deliberately wreck a friend’s car? Doesn’t matter. It will look good on camera. Would this man break a window? Have sex in the street? Literally, not bothered. Did Stoller and DelBanco even think about who would watch this, beyond viewers who will tune in to see the impressive cast and smattering of quality guest stars? Even Kate “Can Do No Wrong In My Eyes” MacKinnon can’t save the scenes she’s in, playing a sex-obsessed YA author.
There is one decent gag about how hard it is to have a clandestine affair when all of your devices ring at once and automatically trigger FaceTime. But the world of the show is ill-defined, has no rules or consistency and the stakes are unimportant because you can’t root for a single person here.
For example, episode four is largely concerned with Ethan and Lisa’s first go at IVF. How to care about the outcome when Ethan’s only been interested in following his nuts to Sam’s summer house for a quickie thus far?
Savage’s character is the only demonstrably “good” person in this whole mess and even he starts to behave like a jerk when his whiny friend/client Ethan comes for a brainstorming session about a new book idea. He ignores his partner and ends up taking drugs because it’s really funny when unlikely people do that.
Not a single one of them has earned the out-there behaviour they exhibit. Unless it turns out they’re all on angel dust and this is the big reveal in series two. God, please don’t let there be a series two.
“We are horrible people,” Sam and Ethan say to each other when the police catch them having sex in a car. They should have called it that and just declared it an art experiment, based on what happens when you gather a group of one-dimensionally awful people in the same city and give them thousands and thousands of dollars.
This is the bleakest piece of television since Threads. But soundtracked by nostalgia-trigger tunes – Brimful of Asha by Cornershop or something by Oasis – in a desperate bid to add the warmth of reminiscence. But there’s no cosying up this nuclear winter of a production.
Where: Netflix.
Length: Eight 30-minute episodes, available to stream now.
Standout episode: Episode two is particularly dreadful for its total lack of character-driven action; the writers just sling their cast about like mean-spirited chess pieces.
If you liked Friends From College: get help. Instead watch The Big Chill (DVD, Amazon, etc), Undeclared (If you can find it. It has sadly been removed from Netflix.)
