'Difficult People': Rooting for the Rudest People in the Room
When Billy Eichner is performing on his cable series Billy on the Street or Julie Klausner is performing on her podcast How Was Your Week?, they are, individually, marvelously complex misanthropes, darkly sarcastic and caustically gleeful about the most superficial aspects of pop culture, the only culture either of them takes seriously. Put them together in the new Hulu-streaming series Difficult People, premiering Wednesday, and Eichner and Klausner very nearly become a nuclear bomb of bile and barely-faux bitterness: Their collision in this sitcom they’ve created for themselves is a black mushroom cloud that some viewers are going to find too strong to take.
Honestly, I’m not sure whether it’s too strong for me as well. I gaped at the premiere episode, fascinated. It was like hearing them recite their Twitter feeds as dialogue, with scenery and movement. (That’s not meant as a criticism — the show has a swift pace to match the staccato quips.)
The pair play warped variations on themselves, two strivers who are so plugged in to cheesy show business (Julie writes Vanderpump Rules recaps for pennies ‘n’ giggles), they can’t figure out why they’re not as rich and famous as the people they follow online so obsessively. What the show captures perfectly are the kind of people who are so immersed in inside-information about entertainment that their own ideas for projects are impossibly obscure — they’ll never appeal to a broad audience. The trick in building a series around characters like this is to make their inaccessibility accessible.
Notice I don’t say “likable” — ”difficult” is where the pleasure resides. Difficult People, one of whose producers is Amy Poehler, is canny in its supporting cast, which helps reveal more sides of the Billy and Julie characters. I’m thinking particularly of James Urbaniak, exceedingly amusing as Julie’s boyfriend, a fussily precise PBS executive, and Andrea Martin as Julie’s monstrously self-absorbed, hypnotist-therapist mother.
Klausner and Eichner are such intelligent performers in every medium they’ve chosen, you have to root for the success of Difficult People. And I say that while still not entirely convinced that this is the best vehicle for those talents.
The first two episodes of Difficult People are streaming on Hulu now. New episodes will premiere on Wednesdays.
