I Can’t Believe Pete Davidson’s TV Show Made Me Cry
I’ve got a very firm threshold for how much “bro” content I can withstand before putting my head through a sheetrock wall.
I will never choose to watch The Hangover, Volumes I, II, or III, when I’ve had a hard week. The trailer for the upcoming film Strays—which features a cast of male comedians, voicing uncanny valley-adjacent dogs who want to bite a man’s dick off—elicited a reaction so nauseating I nearly had to leave the theater. (I saw it ahead of Evil Dead Rises, but the only thing rising was my lunch.) Even as someone who enjoys absolute bottom-of-the-barrel holiday content, I could not stomach Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds chumming it up all the way through Spirited.
Despite this aversion to all things “bro,” I find myself immensely charmed by Pete Davidson. The actor, comedian, and Hollywood rebound boy has turned being a bro into his brand; a Bro-nd, if you will. He surrounds himself with a posse of dudes who are similar to him, dates beautiful women, and gets himself into shenanigans that only someone whose unfiltered, fratty confidence could stir up.
Davidson’s new Peacock original series, Bupkis, spends a good portion of its first season attempting to satirize this image, but only succeeds half the time. The other half, Davidson is up to borderline intolerable mischief with his crew of deadbeat pals, gallivanting around Florida with a guy who calls himself “Crispy,” or hotboxing a van, while a child sits in the back seat, on the way to an amusement park.
This vibe envelops the show, and it was almost enough to put me off the series entirely. That was, until I found myself in a ball of tears, when Bupkis hit me right in the goddamn heart.
Coming off of Bupkis’ premiere, I certainly did not expect this show to have any kind of emotional effect on me. That first episode essentially concludes with Davidson (who plays a semi-fictionalized version of himself) helping his grandfather’s best friend thrust into an escort, after a bout of mid-fuck hip dysplasia. Not exactly an epilogue in the vein of the great Shakespearean comedies. Still, it was serviceable enough to continue. And forge on I did, straight into the hornet’s nest that was an introspective, intimate study of Davidson’s own childhood trauma.
In Bupkis’ second episode, “Do As I Say, Not As I Do,” Davidson recalls his uncle Tommy’s wedding, which he went to with his mother, Amy, just weeks after his father, Scott, a firefighter, died on 9/11. During the ceremony and at the reception, a 7-year-old Pete angers his mother (Edie Falco) by constantly acting out. Pete makes lewd jokes for posed photos, and interrupts his uncle’s vows. In an attempt to empathize and connect with his nephew as best he can, Tommy (Bobby Cannavale), takes Pete under his wing for the night.
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Tommy’s guidance leads to a coke-fueled romp of misplaced wisdom and sloppily imparted life lessons on Pete’s childhood self, which is intercut with scenes of the two reconnecting for an afternoon in the present day. These days, Tommy still struggles to untether himself from his past, caught up in the same whirlwind of shitty decisions that left him stagnant back then. He spends his free time in his garage, making amateur Chinese throwing stars and clinging to his glory days, when he beat out stiff competition to win Sexiest Man on Staten Island.
But it’s not for a lack of trying. Like Pete, Tommy is simply trying to get through life and craft whatever his idea of a brighter future might be. Now that Pete is an adult, he can see himself falling prey to the same doldrums that Tommy has been lured into, just like Tommy saw himself in a younger Pete, who was full of potential but staring down an immense loss, two decades prior.
There are no grand statements of sweeping meaning to be found in Pete and Tommy’s afternoon spent together, only the two men finding a mutual comfort in the fact that they haven’t yet figured it all out. The show doesn’t try to mine any kind of false philosophy for the sake of its narrative. It only aims to tell us that we can be solace to those who are hurting, even when we’re suffering just as much ourselves. Tommy gave that ease to Pete when he was a kid—in his own uniquely twisted, but well-meaning way—and now, Pete can return the favor.
The episode concludes with a final flashback to Tommy’s wedding, with Tommy hyping up the dancefloor, and encouraging his nephew to come dance with everybody. Amy, who has been keeping an eye on him all night—while trying to evade a barrage of “I’m so sorry for your loss” platitudes from fellow guests—makes eye contact with her son. The two of them smile at each other, Pete’s mother silently encouraging him to go join the crowd.
Pete busts a move on the chintzy banquet hall dance floor, the diegetic wedding soundtrack overtaken by Avicii’s 2013 hit, “Wake Me Up” while Pete flails about in slow motion, the only way that kids really know how to dance. Pete is lost in this moment of pure elation, and completely surrounded by love. Everyone else on the floor is screaming his name, while Amy and his grandparents are smiling at him from a nearby table. The camera tightens in on Falco’s face, which aptly holds the array of emotions that Davidson—a writer on the show—knows his mother must have been feeling that night: grief, confusion, worry, and joy, all at once.
The moment is then interspersed with two stunning, additional flashback scenes where Amy and Scott meet for the first time, and another where Pete and his father are watching a movie together on their couch, with Amy nearby. It’s a wallop to the stomach that hits just as hard as Avicii’s thunderous instrumental EDM chorus. The song’s lyrics—particularly the pre-chorus cry of “Wake me up when it’s all over, when I’m wiser and I’m older”—work perfectly in conjunction with the episode’s wistful writing.
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It all comes to a head when the episode fades to black, and a montage of photos from the actual wedding start playing on the screen. There’s the real Pete, the real Amy, and the real Tommy, all dancing together, some 20 years earlier. Everyone is briefly absorbed in their own bliss, putting the massive amounts of grief surrounding them out of their own heads, if only for a few minutes during the night. The “Wake Me Up” lyrics that fall over this collage of photos glide right past cringey and become legitimately moving. “Wish that I could stay forever this young, not afraid to close my eyes/Life’s a game made for everyone, and love is a prize”
They’re the same lyrics I used to scream in my best friend’s car, barreling down highways listening to the song, at the prime of our youth. Untold heartbreak, pain, and love were ahead of us. But that didn’t matter then. All that we knew in those seconds was how to revel in being alive, and appreciate the fact that we had each other.
This one episode of Bupkis takes Davidson’s family’s anguish and creates something truly hopeful from it all. It finds meaning in their grave loss, and translates it into a wild and unexpected meditation on the fragility of our existence. There’s an affirmation throughout the episode’s arc that it’s perfectly fine to be lost, and to fuck up, and to feel the weight of regret that comes with it. Amid all of that lament, there are incredible moments of beauty that come into focus, even if they’re scarce.
The episode allows Bupkis to reach something deeper than all of its criticisms of media and stardom—and certainly something more profound than the surface-level, dude behavior antics that are seen in the season’s other selections. The rest of the season never quite reaches this emotional high, but had I operated on my own preconceptions from the start, I never would’ve found out: Bros have hearts too.
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