‘Life & Beth’: Amy Schumer’s Semi-Autobiographical Comedy Returns Better Than Ever
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In 2022, Amy Schumer starred in two different series. One was the long-delayed fifth season of her sketch comedy show Inside Amy Schumer, which had been absent for six years while Schumer focused on family and on other professional opportunities. The other was Hulu’s Life & Beth, a semi-autobiographical dramedy where Schumer played an unhappy woman who moved back into her childhood home in Long Island after the loss of her mother, trying for a fresh start to a life that hadn’t gone as she once hoped.
The return of Inside Amy Schumer came and went with little notice, and the series’ entire run was recently scrubbed from Paramount+. It had its moments, but like a lot of revivals, it struggled to find its footing in a very different era. Life & Beth, though, struck enough of a chord that it’s back this week for another 10-episode season — and one that’s even better than the first.
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Schumer created the series, and writes and/or directs many episodes. While inspired by her life — most obviously in her relationship with quirky farmer John (Michael Cera), which very much resembles Schumer’s marriage to chef Chris Fischer — the series was a big departure from what she and her collaborators have done in the past. While still featuring lots of comedy — some of it understated, some of it nearly as big and broad as an Inside Amy Schumer sketch — it also took Beth’s unhappiness, and the darkness of her childhood, very seriously, calling on Schumer the actor and Schumer the creative voice to go to a lot of heavy places. Unsurprisingly, it took a while to get the balance right. The first few episodes in particular were almost oppressively bleak, and there were later points where the humor and the pathos seemed to awkwardly co-exist.
But over the course of that season, everything came into balance, especially the more that Schumer and Cera got to play scenes together. John is confident and sincere, as well as eccentric and often hard to read, and is a big departure from the kinds of nervous beta male roles Cera’s best known for playing. But he embodied the character well, and he and Schumer made an appealing team, while the erratic nature of the romance nicely captured the seriocomic tone to which Life & Beth was aspiring.
We resume with the two of them now well into a committed relationship. Beth is mostly happy, though as she tells her exasperated doctor (David Byrne, once again dryly hilarious in this small role), something still feels off between them. John can be incredibly attentive and considerate, or he can seem completely oblivious to her needs — sometimes both at once, like a dinner date in the premiere that see-saws between catastrophe and bliss. Soon, they’re discussing marriage and children, as Schumer’s art begins to imitate her life even more — including Beth beginning to wonder if John, like his real-life counterpart Chris Fischer, is on the autism spectrum.
While this is going on, Schumer and company work to deepen the ensemble(*), spending more time and energy on Beth’s nice but self-destructive ex Matt (Kevin Kane), her sister Annie (Susannah Flood), her pharmacist friend LaVar (LaVar Walker), and her childhood friends Maya (Yamaneika Saunders), Jen (Arielle Siegel), and Jess (Sas Goldberg), among others. Some of their expanded screen time is devoted to how they get along with Beth — Saunders gets a lot of good material here — while others are just amusing and/or sad aspects of their own lives that have little or nothing to do with the tile character. There’s a light-hearted subplot in one episode, for instance, where LaVar and a pill-seeking customer (Tim Daly in a delightful cameo) try to track down a man to whom LaVar fears he gave the wrong medication, while there’s a melancholy arc about Annie going through a mental health crisis that her sister is too self-absorbed to notice. Even characters on the periphery of things are given more to do, like a running gag about how Maya’s boyfriend Shlomo (Gary Gulman) keeps trying to increase the dwindling number of practicing Jews in America.
(*) The one problem with this — and it is a problem with modern television in general, especially on streaming — is that the two-year gap between these seasons makes it harder to remember who everybody is, and thus to connect with some of what they’re dealing with. These increasingly common long hiatuses are never ideal, but they’re more manageable when the focus is kept relatively tight.
We also continue to check in on the teenage version of Beth (Violet Young), and witness the mortifications and traumas she experienced, between her two useless parents (Laura Benanti and Michael Rapaport once again), or all the awful boys in high school. Some of it is just sad, and some genuinely nightmarish, but all of it does a strong job of informing the present-day action. It’s not just that we need that to better understand how Beth and Annie turned out this way, but so that the most ridiculous material — including brief appearances by Jennifer Coolidge, Amy Sedaris, Beanie Feldstein, and more — feels like a release valve, rather than an incompatible clash of styles.
At some point, Schumer might want to do another sketch series, and find a way for it to connect like the original Inside Amy Schumer run did. For now, though, she’s doing something different, and continuing to do it very, very well.
All 10 episodes of Life & Beth Season Two premiere on Hulu on Feb. 16. I’ve seen the whole season.
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