Critic’s Notebook: ‘The Other Two’ Finds Its Way Back to Love in a Hilarious, Bittersweet Finale

Angie Han
·8 min read
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In one of the silliest running gags of The Other Two’s third and final season, Cary (Drew Tarver) dates a Method actor whose commitment makes Jared Leto’s Suicide Squad antics look like child’s play. As Lucas (Fin Argus) slips from one role to the next, he inhabits each one 24/7 — adopting the personality, habits and even the backstory of whatever serial killer or Hallmark boyfriend he’s playing that week. It’s not until the finale that he stops working long enough for Cary to get a glimpse of the real Lucas, and when he does it turns out he’s not much of anyone at all.

Without a role to disappear into, Lucas is left to wander the forest naked and confused, so disconnected from his own identity that he’s surprised to learn he’s Australian. (“No wonder he books,” Cary mutters.) His booked-and-busy career is less a success story than a cautionary tale, running parallel to Cary and Brooke’s struggle to burnish their public images: In immersing himself in these personas, he’s forgotten how to be a person. But the Dubeks have each other through it all, no matter what happens. In a hilarious yet poignant finale, the series circled back to the genuine familial love that’s always been its north star.

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Because for all that The Other Two’s jokes have gotten most of the attention, its acerbic wit has been tempered by an underlying sweetness from the very start. The first-ever installment finds Cary, a struggling actor, and Brooke (Heléne Yorke), a former dancer, regarding their Bieberesque kid brother’s overnight success with a mix of envy, resentment and bafflement. Yet when Chase (Case Walker) comes to them in their hotel room, shyly asking if he can sleep in their bed, their snark melts into sincere curiosity and their sneers soften into smiles. Whatever their feelings about his career, it’s clear they care very much about him.

But it takes Brooke and Cary a while to find their way back to that place in season three. First, the show does them the extreme (and extremely amusing) disservice of giving them everything they’ve been striving for all along. Of course they’re still swallowing humiliations here and there — Cary spends a chunk of the first installment literally begging a masturbating stranger to stream his straight-to-HBO-Max indie instead of a porno, and Brooke spends the next delivering a flash drive she thinks contains a photo of Chase’s armpit. But Cary enters the finale with plans to squeeze in an Oscar-bait drama before jetting off to shoot the next chapter of his sleeper-hit fantasy series, while Brooke prepares to accept a Peabody that will finally prove once and for all that she’s a good person.

As the characters’ ambitions ramped up, so did the show’s humor. The Other Two has long enjoyed poking at the weirdness of Hollywood — like in a season-one visit to Justin Theroux’s over-the-top bachelor pad or a season-two field trip into a creepy Hillsong-esque celebrity church. But the third tilted over into 30 Rock-level absurdity, and in doing so delivered jabs sharp enough to draw blood. In one representative joke, we learn that Chase’s album didn’t flop because it was released the day of the insurrection; the insurrection was engineered by his agent to distract from the awfulness of his album. Space-race billionaires, self-indulgent AIDS plays, do-nothing philanthropic organizations: All got their moment under the show’s withering gaze, in between note-perfect references to everything and everyone from Lukas Gage to Pleasantville.

That the series was so willing to go big and absurd made it all the more notable when it didn’t have to. Cary’s first true taste of fame comes when he’s cast in an animated adventure as Globby, Disney’s “first-ever unapologetically gay character.” (As for what makes him gay at all, a studio exec points to a scene of two sexless snot balls and delivers the inane rationale that “If Globby were straight, he would be in bed with a human woman.”) For much of the episode, from Cary’s junket interviews to the ensuing flurry of Twitter hype, the storyline barely feels like an exaggeration of the press cycle around Beauty and the Beast‘s “exclusively gay moment” — or for that matter, Power Rangers’ and Star Trek’s and so on. As if to underline that very point, Disney’s first nonbinary character was revealed just days after the episode aired, in the form of a Globbishly translucent water entity in Pixar’s Elemental.

The rush of self-importance precipitated by the role becomes part of Cary’s heel turn, as he frames himself as an icon of the LGBTQ community despite his total lack of knowledge about actual LGBTQ icons like Marsha P. Johnson and André Leon Talley. Like Kendall Roy, he’s a character who can be pitiful when he’s down, but becomes outright loathsome when he’s up. Brooke, meanwhile, spends the season demonstrating just how bad she can be in pursuit of doing “undeniable good.” In her calculation, the altruistic impact of a mental health telethon is so significant, and its potential to flatter her so vast, that she’ll keep it on track even if she needs to lock a COVID officer in a broom closet or insinuate that sexual abuse accusers were “asking for it.” (“Your brain really does go there!” she exclaims after hearing herself say the latter; the way Yorke’s eyes bug out as she does so is a thing of beauty.)

But even as the Dubeks lost sight of who they are, The Other Two never did. When season three wasn’t dishing out the most screamingly funny jokes of the show’s run, it was serving up some of its most wrenching drama. Brooke projects all her deepest insecurities onto Lance (Josh Segarra), one of the few people outside her family who know and value her exactly as she is, and then breaks up with him in a Marriage Story-style blowout. Cary gets called on his bullshit by Curtis (Brandon Scott Jones), who astutely notes that though he’s loyally supported Cary, Cary only seems willing to support him as long as Curtis remains less successful than he does.

Both showdowns were a long time coming. Having created these monsters, The Other Two took them to task for the destruction they left in their wake. (That the behind-the-scenes reality of the series apparently reflected Cary and Brooke’s most toxic moments is a depressing, if all too familiar, irony.)

The most poignant epiphany, however, comes for Pat (Molly Shannon). Having ridden her relatable-Midwestern-mom persona to stratospheric success, she longs for the simple days when she could go for a stroll in the park without arranging a total security lockdown, or hang out at Applebee’s without piling on elaborate prosthetics to hide from her adoring public. But once she actually gets the chance to spend a day with her old friends, revisiting all her favorite stores and restaurants, she’s dismayed to discover she’s bored and repulsed by the life she once adored. She cannot go home again, metaphorically or literally, and she doesn’t even want to anymore.

What she does actually miss, she realizes, is her kids. And though Cary and Brooke can be oblivious and selfish and even cruel, The Other Two maintains that they’ll come through when it counts most. In the final half-hour, Cary drops out of his prestige movie to spend time engaging in some much-needed self-reflection, while Brooke loses the Peabody by sacrificing her own reputation to save her mother’s and brother’s. Both turn down the very things they’d hoped would complete them in favor of true growth, and both find the strength to do so thanks to their capacity to love and be loved — though, in a typically wry twist, a mid-credits scene of Brooke getting flooded with potential clients suggests the Dubeks will be back on their bullshit before long.

Our last glimpse of the family all together comes in a dinner at Applebee’s. Sort of. It’s not a real Applebee’s, but a Rehearsal-style simulacrum previously commissioned by Pat’s erstwhile boyfriend, Marvel’s Simu Liu. When Pat first discovered the deception, intended to give her the “normal family dinner” she’d been longing for, she was furious. This time, though, she’s made her peace with the realities of her life. Sure, the restaurant is a set, the other diners hired extras, and the steaks repackaged Peter Luger’s. But the love coursing among the Dubeks is real. Whatever else Hollywood throws at them, The Other Two suggests, that’s what matters most.

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