Friends From College Season 2 Review (Spoilers.)
Who hasn’t wished that they could be in a close-knit group of friends, sharing their lives like they do on Friends or How I Met Your Mother, (Sex in the City, Big Bang Theory, Seinfeld.) The problem with these little self-made families is that after a while their co-dependant dynamics become irksome, unhealthy and unrealistic.
That’s where Friends From College, the second season released earlier this month, gets it right. Friendships aren’t perfect, and six people who went to college together twenty years ago are not going to fit perfectly into each other's lives.
Six walking disasters, fresh from a yearlong separation, come together again after season one's finale. The repercussions of the clusterfuck that was Sam’s fortieth birthday still sting. Ethan and Lisa have split up, as have Sam and her husband, while Nick and Marieanne remain floaters. They all come together for Max and Felix’ engagement party, the only relationship that managed to rekindle. It’s a good thing too because the deadpan, dry delivery of Billy Eichner’s Felix is a perfect audience surrogate. An outsider looking in on the main six with bewilderment, unable to understand why these people act like idiots when they’re together. The characters know this dynamic isn’t totally working, but they have nothing else going on, so they hang out anyway.
It’s this hybrid of complete self-awareness mixed with year’s worth of denial and guilt that makes the series so engaging. There’s no pretty pink bubble surrounding them, shielding them from the consequences of their many horrible decisions. And the fact that they and everyone else thinks they’d be better off without each other just adds depth that most regular slice-of-life comedies don’t give audiences.
You would think the show would be unwatchable, but it’s to the credit of the ensemble, which includes Keegan Michael Key and Cobie Smulders, that you still feel a lot of affection for the core group. It’s easy to love Marrianne (Jae Suh Park), the kooky out of work actor, but she doesn’t get enough airtime. Or Nick, the perpetual man-child. The core of these characters, they happy go lucky attitudes mellow out any heavy situation they’re put in. Even as Nick (Nat Faxon) deals with relationship issues, there’s still plenty of room for him to be silly and the groups wild card.
The heaviest storylines predominantly Ethan and his relationships with Sam and Lisa. Cheating, in this irrelevant writers opinion, is unforgivable and what Ethan does to Lisa really sucks. But Key gives us reasons to root for Ethan as he is split between genuine love for his ex-wife, and the passion of his on and off again relationship with Sam. You can see the struggle.
And by season two’s end, it’s hard to be mad at him because everyone is having sex with everyone. (Felix: “What happened…“All your friends fucked each other and they all freaked out about it?”) After another round of secrets and lies are revealed it becomes apparent that these aren’t all good people, but then what does being ‘good’ mean? Each character is so expertly played, and their stories run so deep, nothing is black and white.
Sometimes friendships end, sometimes they drag on through the awkward occasional gathering or random message after months of not talking. Friends From College knows this, which is more than can be said for most shows. If you can manage to come back together, to find the reason you became friends in the first place and want to hold onto it, it feels much more authentic. And following the little fissures that run through an old friendship leads to much funnier, more fulfilling storytelling.