Amy Schumer’s New Dramedy Life & Beth Tackles Grief, Wine, and Long Island: Review
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The post Amy Schumer’s New Dramedy Life & Beth Tackles Grief, Wine, and Long Island: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: The upcoming Hulu series Life & Beth stars creator Amy Schumer as the titular Beth, a sales rep for a wine distributor who is, in her own words, “barreling toward 40.” Over the course of the first season’s 10 episodes, four of which were directed by Schumer, Beth experiences upheaval in pretty much every area of her life: a death in the family, a breakup, a move, a career change, and a health scare. If that doesn’t sound like a ton of laughs, well, Life & Beth is categorically a comedy with its half-hour episodes, but in practice it’s more of a dramedy.
While the stand-up comics of yesteryear often starred in bright network sitcoms with laugh tracks, comedians of Schumer’s generation make gritty, semi-autobiographical streaming comedies about complicated family dynamics and romantic dysfunction like Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi or Aziz Ansari’s Master of None.
In fact, Life & Beth would make a good companion piece to Somebody Somewhere, the recent HBO Max series starring Schumer’s friend and frequent opening act Bridget Everett. Both shows hit similar story beats, with their protagonists moving back to their hometowns, mourning a family member, and dealing with a parent’s alcoholism.
But where Somebody Somewhere finds Everett on folksy misadventures in small-town Kansas, Life & Beth is a more emotionally intense show where Schumer’s character returns to Long Island and revisits all her childhood traumas.
Life & Beth is funny, though, and gets funnier over the course of the season. At the outset of the series, Beth is living with her boyfriend Matt (Kevin Kane), a handsome but dim co-worker who embarrasses her with a flash mob proposal that doesn’t end well.
As her life starts to unravel, we see increasingly frequent flashbacks of teenage Beth (played with impressive gravity by Violet Young), almost always in sad or traumatic experiences. And even when Beth meets a more promising new love interest, things remain complicated.
Life & Beth (Hulu)
Michael Cera plays against type as John, a farmhand at a vineyard, whose shirt is splattered with animal blood when Beth meets him in the third episode. Even bearded and in his mid-thirties, Cera has an essential boyishness far beyond the fact that we’ve been watching him onscreen since he was a teenager. And his innate vulnerability feels novel in the context of an outdoorsy character who’s a little uninhibited and bad at communicating.
In one of the show’s best running gags, John doesn’t know how to lower his voice to a whisper when he’s saying something the whole room isn’t meant to hear. And John and Beth’s awkward chemistry and stumbling romantic entanglement imbues the later episodes with genuine warmth.
The biggest revelation of the cast is Susannah Flood, who plays Beth’s younger sister Ann. In the early episodes, when relations between the sisters are at their most strained, Ann mostly appears on the other end of phone calls with Beth, but Flood manages to steal those scenes anyway.
At one point, Ann responds to unwelcome news by putting down the phone, opening the refrigerator, and angrily hurling an egg into a trash can. In a later scene, she abruptly hangs up on Beth and throws the phone across the room. When Beth and Ann finally share significant screentime in the second half of the season, their thorny sibling bond animates Life & Beth’s funniest and most relatable moments.
Life & Beth (Hulu)rrr
Familiar Faces: Schumer has populated Life & Beth with an array of famous friends and fellow comedians, in small bit parts that often contribute the show’s most entertaining moments. The pilot episode opens with a scene of Beth bantering with Search Party’s John Early, while David Byrne plays a doctor in a couple of brief scenes, and Hank Azaria is a funeral home director who’s distracted by his diet.
The best bit part in Life & Beth comes from Jonathan Groff, who plays Travis, Beth’s one-night stand in the third episode. Over the course of a handful of scenes, Travis slowly metamorphoses from a shallow but attractive romantic prospect to a deeply weird and pathetic character and then, finally, an unsympathetic ass. It’s both a relief and a little disappointing when Groff’s brief chapter of the story comes to an end.
In college, Schumer was a theater major, and didn’t start actively performing standup until later. But within a couple of years, she started booking TV gigs and became a finalist on Last Comic Standing. Whether it was acting or comedy that became her route to stardom, she then found her sharp, self-deprecating voice and satirical edge in her best-known projects, the Peabody-winning Comedy Central sketch series Inside Amy Schumer and the Judd Apatow-directed 2015 feature Trainwreck, which felt like extensions of her standup material.
If Amy Schumer does harbor ambitions as a serious actor, though, Life & Beth features her most compelling and complex onscreen performance to date. She gets many of the show’s biggest laughs, but just as often she’s the straight man to the supporting cast’s various oddballs.
Her tense scenes with Beth’s mother (Lauren Benanti) and father (Michael Rapaport) show without telling, deftly exposing the fault lines in their relationships without giving you the whole backstory. And in Schumer’s best moment of the series, Beth is called up onstage at a karaoke night to sing Ace of Base’s “The Sign” seconds after receiving devastating news, and decides she’d rather power through and sing the song than talk about it.
The Verdict: Life & Beth is a show that shifts tones from silly to somber as often as the score switches from piano jazz to trap rap, but the up-and-down mood swings feel true to life. There’s a hilarious fishing trip involving psychedelic mushrooms, and a hospital technician and aspiring DJ who plays Khia’s “My Neck, My Back” during Beth’s MRI scan.
But it’s also a surprisingly heavy show with multiple funerals (in fact, there’s two funerals for the same character). It’s a much more personal statement from Amy Schumer than the absurdist social satire of Inside Amy Schumer, but the laughs often come from the same place.
Where to Watch: All 10 episodes of Life & Beth premiere on Hulu on Friday, March 18th.
Trailer:
Amy Schumer’s New Dramedy Life & Beth Tackles Grief, Wine, and Long Island: Review
Al Shipley
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