For a few years, in the mid-2010s, Amy Schumer was the most famous and famous comic voice to be found anywhere in American pop culture. Her Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer viciously parodied the television of the time. (Josh Charles came for flawless parodies of Friday Night Lights and The Newsroom, the latter “gifted to you by Aaron Sorkin.”) He dug deep into the weird and terrible ways that society can look at women, or the way women can look at women. themselves, whether it be in the implied homoeroticism of the male infatuation with “chicks that can hang themselves” or in the way women are conditioned to view obesity as the worst social sin they can commit. And in the masterpiece of the show, a parody of Twelve Angry Men, where the jury argued whether Schumer was attractive enough to host her own TV show, it was all done at the same time.
After the series ended, Schumer starred in several more films, co-hosted a cooking show about the pandemic with her chef husband Chris Fisher, and starred in a documentary series about her latest comedy tour, which coincided with a difficult pregnancy. She almost didn’t disappear, but still wasn’t present in the zeitgeist the way she was during Comedy Central’s days. So while her new Hulu show Life and Beth, which she created, which she stars in, writes for, occasionally directs and executive produces, isn’t exactly a comeback vehicle, it does feel like a louder a statement that she is entering a new phase of life. her career than, say, Amy Schumer learning to cook.
Despite its relatively short history, Life & Beth can sometimes feel guilty about trying to do too much, as if Schumer and her staff (including Inside Amy Schumer director Ryan McFaul) want to showcase everything she’s still capable of ever since. since she last took center stage, and showcase the new skills she’s acquired along the way. Not all of these things work seamlessly with each other, and some of them don’t work at all. But Life and Beth is an interesting and ultimately sweet and enjoyable story, sort of a solid soft restart for Schumer herself.
Judging by the witty title, Schumer plays a woman named Beth.
, whose life on paper seems enviable. She lives in Manhattan, is in a long-term relationship with handsome Matt (Kevin Kane) and works as a wine distributor, which allows her to visit all the trendiest restaurants in the city. We get to know her when she suggests to some potential clients that they buy her company’s wine, but she soon talks about herself and her supposedly beautiful existence, as that’s what they seem to want to hear. The more she talks, the less enthusiasm in her voice. She just keeps working with Matt, simply because it’s the path of least resistance. But she cannot understand why she is so unhappy.
My guess is she could play a woman called “Life” and the whole thing could be a satire of a cop buddy – possibly starring Schumer’s old girlfriend Bridget Everett in between seasons of Somebody Somewhere, which features comedian Murray Hill. in this show. — but it’s quite different.
This first episode also features Laura Benanti, who plays Beth Jane’s mother. Benanti and Schumer are basically the same age – at least Michael Rapaport, who plays her father Leonard in several episodes, is ten years older – and at first the casting seems like a joke about how old and tired Beth feels even as her mom bounces. like she’s still a young woman. The rationale is more complex than that, as is the nature of Beth’s relationship with Jane, why Beth seems so uncomfortable around her mom, and why her little sister Ann (Suzanne Flood) doesn’t want to be a part of Jane at all. An unexpected event forces Beth to reevaluate everything and everyone that has brought her to this point and take a break from the city to spend time on her old Long Island in hopes of finding out how she got to be like this.
Tonal show can be all over the map. The first few episodes are almost depressingly dark in the way they put you in Beth’s head to appreciate her total boredom. It isn’t until the third episode that the actual shape of the season really comes into focus, including the arrival of Michael Cera as John, a straight-forward farmer who processes produce at a local winery. It’s only in the fourth (directed by Schumer and written by Amy Schumer’s fellow veteran Tami Sager) that all the elements of the show are not just comedy and drama, but a modern-day Beth story versus flashbacks to a young Beth (Violet Young). ) in the nineties – start to really click. However, even after this episode, style can fluctuate wildly: a button-down and slightly quirky art-house drama for one minute; broad comedy in the style of a sketch.
But if the pieces often seem out of place, they tend to be strong individually. The main goal seems to be to demonstrate that Schumer can play a more serious and frankly flawed (even compared to something like Trainwreck) character. Life & Beth excel at this; she’s very good and becomes more compelling the more we learn about how Beth’s past affects her current circumstances. But the show does a good job of showing other actors in new ways, from performers who appear in odd, short cameos like Hank Azaria and David Byrne to those who are more prominently featured in an episode or two (Jonathan Groff is very funny as a personal character) . coach who seems to love Beth completely because she lives in Manhattan), for those used in larger, permanent roles. This is a completely different, completely unflappable and yet sincere Michael Cera, not the guy we are used to. Anyone who has seen Schumer and her husband interact in various documentaries will recognize some of the dynamics between Beth and John, and if they don’t seem like a great couple at first, there’s something terribly charming about how art has chosen to mimic life here. .
And while the humor can sometimes feel like a forced or untimely outlet valve for Beth’s ongoing discomfort, the show shows off a captivatingly sly and almost gentle sense of humor over time. For example, there’s an effective joke about Beth’s black friend Maya (Jamaneyka Saunders) now dating exclusively Jewish men, and another about an endless pile of Amazon bags on Jane’s doorstep every time Beth comes back to her. childhood home. In one episode, Beth’s friends take her to a local club to cheer her up; for a few minutes everyone admits their feet are killing them and they hate the atmosphere, followed by a cut where they have much more fun watching Nordstrom Rack. Even the sequence in which Beth, John, and Ann pick mushrooms and go for a ride on John’s boat is one of the mildest examples of a comedic episode in which all the main characters get high at the same time. And, of course, Schumer still knows how to play up a good punchline, like Beth comparing the night with an athletic man to “a sea otter fucking a marble slab.”
While Hulu has been ahead of the curve with weekly episodes (or at least hybrids) for many of its shows, Life & Beth will be one of their periodic binge releases, with all 10 episodes airing on March 18th. , it’s for the best. It’s not just that the show takes a while to find itself, and it’s not that it’s still moving at a very leisurely pace, even when it becomes clear what the premise and tone are (mostly). The thing is, the old traumas that Beth struggles with—both physical and emotional—are subtle and delicate things that are best learned about in a short amount of time, rather than being the subject of grandiose theorizing for several weeks in a row. Trying new things can be scary, whether you jump right in like Beth or come back after a break like Amy. Life & Beth, like its heroine, is imperfect. But if he sometimes stumbles over his own ambitions, it also demonstrates that whatever Amy Schumer wants to try next – as an actress and/or creator – she has the varied and impressive skills to make it work.