FYC: The TV Comedy Strikes Back?

Shooting from the hip on four new sitcoms: one great, two fine, one 'And Just Like That'

Los Angeles is currently playing host to both 2000 members of the National Guard and 700 Marines, called in by a pathetic would-be despot to provide backup for a bunch of Tommy Bahama Gestapo (ICE).

But Los Angeles is also in the throes of FYC season, as every TV show aired between June 1st, 2024 and May 31st, 2025 is vying for Emmy contention. One of these LA events is more important, but the other is easier to talk about! And so today we¹ wanted to share our² thoughts on four new sitcoms (well, one returning), which I believe in 2025 is the legal maximum number of comedies that can air at the same time.

NOTE: None of these will be nominated for — let alone win — any Emmys but if I’ve learned anything from ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 and its Official companion podcast, THEME matters more than anything. We are writing to an Emmy THEME

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‘Adults’ (Hulu)

It’s gotta be said: you don’t name your show ‘Adults’ if you’re not actively inviting ‘Girls’ comparisons, so anything I write from here should be considered FAIR RETALIATION when the first shot was fired by FX/Hulu. I get that people hate Lena Dunham. I get how they hate Lena Dunham, who to many encapsulates everything they hate (everything they think they hate) about Millennials: our ironic detachment, our solipsism, our predilection for stick-and-poke tattoos.

But ‘Girls’ is a generationally brilliant work of art, only better with age, created by someone who absolutely understood and successfully skewered all the above criticism. With Donald Glover, she’s the best of Millennial TV creators.

I’ll stop talking about ‘Girls’, because ‘Adults’ has nothing to do with ‘Girls’: in aim, in tone, in execution. No, the closest analog here — and I’m being very charitable — is something like ‘Broad City’, which less satirizes post-college New York than turns it into a cartoon playground, of malleable reality. These aren’t characters, they’re comic TYPES bouncing off each other (and the city, which we are mandated to say is… sort of like its own character, really) through eight misadventures in adulting. Job promotions! Healthcare! Hosting a dinner party! It’s not not funny³ but the humor, from my vantage point, comes at the expense of building any kind of relationship with these characters or their struggles. Actually, ‘Broad City’ did make me care about Abbi and Ilana, where whatever insane shit they got up to in an individual episode was always grounded in a genuine sense of friendship. These kids (several of whom, including Owen Thiele, are stars destined for greater things) just feel like a collection of Gen-Z tics performing TikToks to one another in real time.

…Very possibly that is the oldest sentence I have ever written but I stand by my criticism.

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‘Overcompensating’ (Amazon)

I was fully prepared to hate this when the first ads for it made sure to focus on Charli XCX’s involvement, this cool drug kid energy I can’t believe is still being foisted on us a full year after “brat summer” both galvanized and doomed Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. Oh, is ‘Overcompensating’ brat? Is it going to be a second brat summer? Do I need to do a key bump every time a character says “it’s giving”?

So I was pleasantly surprised after watching the first few episodes of Benito Skinner’s gay coming-of-age comedy and realizing it’s a vastly more thoughtful, sincere show than I was expecting! And not for nothing, one that (I know I say this all the time now) feels excited to be a TV show, which is to say episodic stories that quietly cohere into a bigger story. The engine is Benny’s (Skinner) college sexual awakening, a former golden boy jock coming to terms with the fact he’s definitely gay. But every character’s navigating their own personal journey, from Benny’s new best friend (Wally Baram, excellent) figuring out where she fits on campus to Benny’s sister (Mary Beth Baron) slowly crawling out of her boyfriend’s shadow. Like many streaming comedies, this one only got eight episodes for its freshman (as yet un-renewed) season. But unlike ‘Adults’, it managed genuine arcs for its entire cast in that limited frame. Imagine if it had gotten sixteen episodes! Twenty-four!

‘Overcompensating’ manages to feel real even if there’s an almost performance art quality to a bunch of 30-somethings playing college kids. I’m not saying it’s like ‘Pen15’⁴, which literalized that conceit. But I am saying there’s a pleasing nostalgic haze to it, Skinner looking back on his college self and, with some distance, able to see that moment in time clearly — and make it funnier than it probably was as a, you know, lived experience. Salty, sweet, I’d go so far as to call this the gay successor to ‘Undeclared’. (Which I hope doesn’t mean it will be cancelled after one season.)

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‘Stick’ (Apple)

You guys are well aware by now of how I feel about ‘Ted Lasso’, and the Cult of Kindness erected in his mustachioed wake. So when I say that Apple TV+’s new Owen Wilson golf dramedy was clearly sculpted in His image, well…

‘Stick’ is fine. That’s by design! It’s a drama that’s not that dramatic, and a comedy that’s not that funny. But it stars Wilson, who in addition to providing essential co-writing ♥️ to Wes Anderson’s first three movies, is just so endlessly likable that even starring in something meh, you think “it was nice to see him.” It’s nice to see him here as a down-on-his-luck former golf pro who — would you believe it — is navigating trauma and may just have a shot at redemption in a young golf phenom (also navigating trauma). Judy Greer plays his ex-wife. She’s nice, too. Marc Maron is gruff, but nice. If any character is mean, it’s only because they suffered some prior trauma and will learn, with practice, to be nice. Somehow it was decided these lessons could not be learned with anything less than 34 minute runtimes for episodes that, like I said, are not funny. The golfing looks nice.

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‘And Just Like That’ (HBO)

Okay.

It took me until last fall to watch, twenty years later, (most of) ‘Sex and the City’, a show that like any good “no homo” straight boy of the early ‘00s I’d avoided like the plague when it was airing. My mistake! With all my heart, I love ‘SatC’ — I love its balance of frothy bullshit and sometimes genuine drama, its depiction of a magical city since-ceded to billionaires, its genuine interest in (and facility with) social mores of the time⁵.

Most importantly, I love the four women at its center: prickly (Miranda), honest (Samantha), endearing (Charlotte), and insane (Carrie). As much as a show that spawned two terrible movies — one of which included the pun “Lawrence of my labia” — can be considered “real,” ‘SatC’ was real.

…’And We’re Back’ is anything but! This is not news. The game was lost the moment Kim Cattrall walked away from what I’m assuming was a dump-truck full of money to once more step into Samantha’s thongs. Over two seasons, what’s emerged is a sort of Frankenstein(‘s monster) of beats that sort of feel like vintage ‘SatC’, sometimes, but ultimately reveal themselves to be shallow modern approximations. Or, more often than not, some sort of humiliation ritual from Michael Patrick King.

Season three’s off to the races with Carrie and Aidan attempting long-distance, Miranda dipping her toes into lesbian dating, and Charlotte… I don’t know, helping Anthony market his “HotFellas” bread delivery service (which also has a brick and mortar). There are other characters, too, an admirable attempt to bring non-white perspectives into a world that until this sequel series was lily-white, but they may as well be the phrases “As a Black filmmaker…” and “As an Indian Samantha…” brought to life.

ALL of them, across the board, feel like middle-aged cartoons, which like I said scans as some sort of humiliation ritual from (as they call him on the Every Outfit podcast), Daddy MPK, who seems to like women as little dolls but fear them as people. Carrie is and always has been a mentally ill person, but the way she’s portrayed in episode #302, this 60-year-old woman shrieking at rats in a $10,000 dress and spending an entire episode fretting over what to text her boyfriend? And don’t get me started on Charlotte, saddled that same episode with a leftover ‘Nanny Diaries’ subplot about snaring the vaunted “Ivy Whisperer” to help her daughter get into college. Cartoon shit! Charlotte’s always leaned that way (it’s not as though half her original ‘SatC’ stories didn’t involve Central Park dogs), but she was still played as, you know, an adult woman. Here she’s like an expensive handbag in human form. Character assassinations left and right!

If I’m getting heated about ‘And Just Like That’, I’m sorry, it’s probably because my city is currently under siege by federal troops.

1. I

2. my

3. there’s one bit where a character AirPlays his text messages that’s very, very funny

4. one of the best shows of the last ten years, full-tilt, if you haven’t watched already

5. even if more than a few of these bits no longer hold up under scrutiny I NEED TO SEE YOU SPIN FIRST, SISTER