And so the leaves turn brown and the seas turn cold and the buds burst from the ground: as seasons dictate the rhythm of our years, imported-from-America-and-repeated-a-lot-on-E4 sitcoms pace out our generations. There was Friends and there was Scrubs and there was How I Met Your Mother. There was New Girl for a bit and The Big Bang Theory for even longer. Brooklyn Nine-Nine? Does Brooklyn Nine-Nine count? Brooklyn Nine-Nine was and is in the mix. And now we have The Other Two (Thursday, E4, 10pm), which is so much better than it has any business being.
The setup is this: newly famous 13-year-old, fresh-faced, early-Bieber cypher Chase AKA “ChaseDreams” (Case Walker) performs his song Marry U at Recess on American morning TV and goes viral. His pushy-but-loving stage mom (Molly Shannon, in full yes-I’d-like-to-speak-to-the-manager-,-please-! hair) is by his side in every interview. And there, drowning in the background, just out of shot, his older brother Cary (Drew Tarver) and older sister Brooke (Heléne Yorke), a failed actor and a failed dancer respectively, are slowly being eclipsed by their younger brother. The pitch meetings for this must have been a joy: just striding into various production houses and saying “what if Justin Bieber had two older siblings no one cared about?” and having money thrown in the direction of the mouth that said it.
Anyway, in the wrong hands, an idea like this could easily swerve into the contrived: overly produced videos aimed at spoofing the already-on-the-edge-of-parody world of teen heartthrobs, for example, or scenes that imagine unrelatable high-stress squabbles in the backstage area of late-night chatshows. Instead, The Other Two – written by two former Saturday Night Live head writers, Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, and produced under the Lorne Michaels co-sign – focuses on the sheer dirtbaggery of failing in New York: squatting in the luxury flat you’re meant to be selling; eating pizza for breakfast; having a very confusing make-out session with your basketball shorts-wearing roommate. Both Cary and Brooke are a mess, which is refreshing to see. Nobody lives in a bafflingly huge apartment; nobody has regular meet-ups at the local bar with the sassy-but-grumpy manager; everyone has the same exact energy, which is “counts pennies out from their change mug every week before payday”.
And the one-liners are astounding. After Brooke, fresh out of a long-term relationship with an adult man who still dabs, announces she’s “seen one dick for four years … this summer, I’m going to see FIFTY dicks”, she taxis out to an airport for a 45-minute tryst with a flight attendant. “I’m going to be in JFK for 70 minutes on Thursday,” he says, buttoning up his shirt afterwards, “maybe we could meet in the baggage carousel toilet and I could kiss you on the lips.” In the first Cary-Brooke scene, Cary reflects on making out with his male housemate. “Maybe he’s bisexual? It’s not 2010 any more, those people actually exist.” We deserve this. After years of watching Sheldon knock on Penny’s door while being really uptight about maths, we deserve this. This is the comedy we deserve.
