Seth Rogen & Rose Byrne reunite for a second season of Platonic
There aren’t many TV shows with casts you just want to hang out with. In the past these have included Cheers, Cougar Town, Friends, Happy Endings — even You’re the Worst. But these days a “folks I’d like to have a beer with” comedy is harder to come by. Thankfully, Platonic returns with a second season of quirky new adventures for best friends Will (Seth Rogen) and Sylvia (Rose Byrne) to scratch that itch. “The tone and style of the show is very specific: light and fun and, in a nice way, it doesn’t have incredibly high stakes moment to moment,” describes Rogen. “It kind of reminds me of the sitcoms that I grew up watching, like Seinfeld, where its main directive was to explore comedic situations.”
Having rekindled their college relationship in the first season these two are now free to find the fun in midlife, in ways only Will and Sylvia can. The fact that they are a man and a woman who are not romantically involved, that’s more of a problem for others. “The setup is really about how everybody else feels about them being platonic friends, rather than the actual friendship,” says Byrne. “Once it’s revealed that it’s super dysfunctional, what they bring out is the best and worst in each other.”
This season that means tackling marriage and other societal expectations, particularly in Will’s case. “It’s about trying to be comfortable where he is, even if it’s slightly out of step with what his peers expect of him or he thinks he should do,” says Francesca Delbanco, who created the series with her real-life husband Nicholas Stoller. “There are certain markers of adulthood that Will doesn’t necessarily yearn or crave, but he still feels some kind of compulsion to check them off the list; have a real corporate job that’s in a structure we all understand and get married and maybe have a family. His struggle is coming to terms with the fact that he doesn’t have to want the same things that people around him might want.”
For Sylvia, the season delves into what happens when a midlife rut is suddenly disrupted. “There is a way in which life as you get older becomes kind of samey samey. You’re married, you have kids, you’ve got to wake up and take them to school and do the things,” says Delbanco. “But things do not always stay the same. Things come out of left field in your life, dynamics in your family and in your marriage will change and you have to acknowledge them.” Surprisingly, it is Sylvia’s husband Charlie, played by Luke Macfarlane, who throws a wrench into their stable life. “Charlie is, for the first time maybe ever, looking around and being like, is this the life I want to lead?” says Stoller. “Sylvia’s always assumed her marriage is going to be the same and I think Charlie becomes a surprising agent of change — something that she turns to Will for help with, because his life is always chaos.”
Delbanco and Stoller, who initially based the series on Delbanco’s real-life friendship, continue to happily cull more Platonic storylines from their own lives. “There’s a core emotional truth to what these characters are going through that I think that reflects our experience and our writers’ experience,” says Stoller. Delbanco adds that making the show feel like a true slice of life is what makes it endlessly refillable and relatable. “It is kind of the joy of doing it,” she says. “I often joke that when we get into the writer’s room, we ask everybody to push their worst stories and experiences and most conflicted relationships into the middle of the table so we can sort through them. But once you start actually dealing with the specific story, none of them will be exactly beat-by-beat mirroring your life.”
It’s that close-but-not-quite element to the series that off-screen friends Byrne and Rogen enjoy most about their characters. “I don’t personally relate to Will all that much, it’s more something I see in people that I’m friends with — this sort of midlife crisis, not being able to settle down, not knowing what you want, not knowing what’s good for you, grasping at straws to find yourself even as you’re in your mid-40s,” says Rogen. “That’s something I see a lot and it is very funny.” Though Sylvia is far more nosy and energetic than Byrne, she acknowledges some similarities to her character. “I do relate to raising small kids. When you’re in the trenches with little kids, that just changes things. And it’s crazy being middle aged. Like, how did this happen? I was always the youngest person in the room and now I am not.”
Even if not basing it on their lives, Byrne says Delbanco and Stoller know how to write to their strengths. That’s the easy part, according to the couple. “Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne are two of the funniest people alive and they have such amazing chemistry,” says Delbanco. “Getting to write these characters for them is a huge part of the pleasure of creating the show.” Adds Stoller: “We knew that on this show, being friends, they would be able to fight all the time and that it was going to be very funny to watch these two actors fight with one another. They’re obviously the key to making this whole show work.”
Platonic, streaming on Wednesday, August 20, on Apple TV+