Two weeks ago, I posted my quarterly photo dump on Instagram. It’s always a hideous day.
The thought blooms into my brain at some point, usually in the morning when my resolve for doing things has yet to be inked out. A picture on my camera roll catches my eye and I say, “you know what I haven’t done in a while?” Then I spend hours curating, pruning my garden down to 10 photographs, meticulously deciding which order they should go in to best tell the story of my existence the last few months. I oscillate between a more accurate portrayal and one with a filter of cool and carefree. But the former is just a ploy to be cool and unbothered by all this social media stuff, not afraid to show the real me. In this most recent case, I was posting a selection of pictures from a roll of film that only partially developed and took hours to load onto my computer. So definitely going for the cool.
The whole process is laborious, but the worst part comes after I hit “post.” For hours afterwards, I compulsively thumb that ugly pink camera icon. Fifteen seconds in, one like. We’re off to a good start. 30 minutes in and not a single comment even though I tagged six friends. No one on this earth cares if I live or die. A full hour, only 33 likes and still no comments. Should I have joined a sorority? Two hours in, 50 likes, two comments but only because I texted a group chat “sad bc no one commented on my Instagram post :(“ Why is no one commenting on this blurry picture of me dancing in a dark room? Have the people I went to high school with who haven’t seen me in 10 years noticed yet that I have bangs? Are they thinking, like, ’she looks really good with bangs’? Is anyone jealous of me? Whatever, why do I care? The planet is burning! Oh God, do people think I don’t care about climate change? Should I delete this post? Am I the villain? No way. I’m good. I am good! I mean? right?
Can you tell this is an essay about Max’s The Other Two yet?
This really did happen to me two weeks ago. And what I did, instead of throw my phone into the ocean, was sit on my sofa and watch my friend Cary Dubek fall face-first into a diaper of his own piss in a gas station bathroom trying to get cell service so he can keep resharing all the Instagram stories he’s been tagged in after reaching the highest echelon of success he believes a gay man striving to be an actor in New York City can achieve: showing up to your high school reunion in Ohio as the most famous person there. Coming down from the high of being adored by strangers, Cary tries to fill the gaping hole inside of him with a constant refresh (this felt crushingly familiar). But the hole is, as they always are, bottomless. Every story he’s tagged in evaporates in the belly of this insatiable beast inside him that keeps demanding more, more, more! You think by the end of the episode, he’s had some kind of revelation about fame and notoriety and the emptiness it brings him. But instead he pivots deeper into the beast.
If you haven’t watched the beautiful and hilarious The Other Two on Max, I’m going to try not to put any more specific spoilers in here because I want you all to 1) continue reading this essay and 2) for the love of God, watch this perfect show. The premise is two 30-something siblings, Cary and Brooke Dubek, trying to “make it” in New York City — Cary as an actor and Brooke as a dancer (and then eventual talent manager). But they’re both thrown for a loop when their younger brother Chase rises to overnight mega-fame with a Justin Bieber-esque singing career. Their mother (played flawlessly by Molly Shannon) also has her turn in the spotlight. But now that Cary and Brooke have a giant familial wedge in the door to becoming famous, which they both desperately want, they keep coming out empty handed.
The show is a wickedly funny but also dark look at fame that spirals into magical realism by the final season. It takes aim at all corners of popular culture from Elon Musk to Hillsong Church to Zoom casting couches. But it never takes its eye off of “the other two.”
In the shadow of a 15 year old and a 50 year old’s rise to stardom, we watch Brooke and Cary in the inbetween, descending into the most absurd nihilistic versions of themselves.
Their arcs aren’t too different, really, from television's beloved anti-heros. From Tony Soprano, to the more recent Barry Berkman in Max’s Barry, which aired its final season last month.
Maybe it’s Taylor Swift’s reclamation of the phrase in her hit single “Anti-Hero” that’s making these kinds of characters feel like they belong in a category primarily reserved for hit men and leaders of drug rings. The song confesses crimes as serious as ghosting, and “scheming” (which I guess is what all these mobsters are doing), but when you look deeper, it could be a song about Tony Soprano (“I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror”) or Brooke Dubek (“Did you hear my covert narcissism disguised as altruism?”).
I know directly quoting Taylor Swift lyrics here like she’s a 19th century poet will cause some of our readers distress, but I think it gets to the localization of the term. Swift, herself (with all them airline miles) might truly be an anti-hero, but the song could describe Kevin Spacey in House of Cards and also me two hours after that Insta post went live. In a world where no moral consumption exists under capitalism, we’re all kind of anti-heroes.
Like the song, creators and SNL alums Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider allow us to use Brooke and Cary as a way to feel more comfortable with the “bad” parts of ourselves. Together, we sing “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it's me” and it feels OK to be the problem. To be the villain. It feels normal. As the third season was coming to a close though, it felt like they were pulling that blanket out from underneath us.
It’s possible that “anti-hero” has become an antiquated term in television. It was used initially to delineate a massive shift, in which shows didn’t have to center around a character who was morally good. But now that describes most television shows. In fact, we pivoted so far in the immoral direction, we’ve now swung back around with shows like Ted Lasso and Shrinking, dramedies that emphasize just how lovable and redeemable their characters actually are because we’ve been so inundated with the insufferable billionaires and casual killers.
It seems ridiculous, at this point, to call any character at the center of a television show who is fundamentally flawed an “anti-hero.” And yet, there’s part of me that does want to put Cary and Brooke in their own special room of the anti-hero castle (hell?), one where they can hang out with all the terrifying 20-somethings in Search Party and Marnie, Hannah and Jessa from Girls, and maybe even, on their bad days, Abbi and Ilana from Broad City.
They’re a very different breed from the macho but tragic men who have taken up the anti-hero mantle since Sopranos hit the scene, but in a way, they’re just as subversive.
The Other Two followed a trajectory not all too different from The Sopranos. The Dubeks, especially Brooke and Cary, are far from morally righteous. They put on a very thin veil of your bread and butter millennial liberal values, but they’re willing to drop it immediately for money, fame and power (see season two’s Hillsong episode). They often do care about social justice-type issues (particularly ones that directly impact them like Brooke claiming to be a champion for women and Cary making a big deal about voicing Disney’s first openly gay Pixar character, who is a blob that at one point is in bed with another blob) but their priorities are centered around notoriety and attention. Cary becomes so obsessed with posting on his Instagram to hype up an acting project he’s in, his mother hires actors to blackmail him and promises to give him the money on the condition that he cuts down on the posting.
But it’s fun to hang out with Brooke and Cary precisely because they can’t really hide who they are or their most prominent intentions (which are inherently selfish). They represent the most self indulgent versions of ourselves, at least those of us who can’t evade the vapid social media landscape entirely. They give us permission to be a little selfish and to care about stupid things like, say, how many likes your seasonal Instagram photo dump sees.
Until they don’t anymore.
The thing about anti-heroes is they start off bad. What changes, as the show goes on, isn’t usually their behavior, it’s the audience’s orientation to it. Tony Soprano was always a murderous mob guy with a toxic masculinity complex, but we start off watching him in therapy. There’s a hint that he’s trying to be better, or at least to know himself better. We’re expecting growth, so we are immediately softened, looking for cracks in the rough exterior and pleased when we find a few. But as the show continues, we sit for longer periods of time with Tony. He’s like a roommate unveiling all sides of himself to us simply through time and proximity. And we come to learn that there isn’t much room for growth in that ever expanding beer belly. By the end there’s not much to be redeemed about Tony, and it isn’t that he’s really gotten all that worse, it’s just that we, as the audience, know more and expect less. Barry does something similar. The shows both toy with the characters illusions of themselves. Barry thinks he’s a good guy who’s just done some bad stuff, most of it justifiable even in the eyes of God. Tony thinks he’s “the strong quiet type,” just a guy handed an impossible job and trying to do the best he can with it. Both of these images are massively distorted and even Tony and Barry seem to understand this by the series’ end, but they cling to the distortion. Without it, their world doesn’t work.
With The Other Two, these characters don’t start off murderous. But they do start off selfish. In the pilot episode, when Chase’s hapless manager Streeter (perfectly cast as Ken Marino) tells the family that Chase is sick in a hotel room because Streeter instructed the teen to eat a dozen raw eggs for lunch so he could “buff up” to present at the Kid’s Choice Awards, all Brooke and Cary hear is that he’s presenting in an awards show.
Yes, the characters’ social status changes drastically throughout the show, and with it they certainly do become worse. They lose friends they’ve had forever. They bring their sweet selfless mother down to their level. But what changes more is the tone of the show. Drew Tarver, who plays Cary, has proved himself a massive talent in this final season, spiraling into full savagery as his quest for fame becomes more singular. The scenes with him in it in this final season feel less like a comedy and more like a thriller. He’s always had a flair for the dramatic (the scene where he starts Call Me By Your Name-ing in season one will forever be one of my favorites) but the show chooses to make us uncomfortable with the absurdity in the final episodes of the show instead of just letting us laugh with him.
Brooke, played flawlessly by Heléne York, also shares this anti-hero quality of holding onto a thin mask of moral credibility even though she knows it really doesn’t work. Her routine insistence on “doing good” this season, culminating in a messy “Night of Undeniable Good” telethon she hosts to rehabilitate her brother Chase’s image, doesn’t sound too far off from Barry’s “starting now!” from earlier seasons, in which he insists that from now on, he’s not going to kill anybody else. This is, of course, a lie he is telling himself. Just like Brooke’s confidence that changing her Instagram bio to include “she/her” is doing the world a great service. Just like Barry, we think she’s maybe been pushed too far over the edge at one point, that she can’t believe the lies she’s been telling herself anymore. But then life throws her a bone and she doubles down.
You also see this willful descent in a show like Search Party, where even as the millennials try to change course and become better people after their inherent selfishness has landed them in all kinds of trouble (like zombie apocalypse trouble), it ultimately proves too hard to make the change. It’s easier to lie to themselves on the outside while inwardly accepting that this is who they are and who they’ll always be.
I thought The Other Two was headed in the same direction. But once I got to the finale, I realized I was wrong. Schneider and Kelly weren’t spinning their characters so far into amoral perpetuity to where they couldn’t come back and we’d all have to accept and sit in the damage they’ve caused. Instead, they were driving them to rock bottom so they could finally have a come-to-Jesus moment, so they could finally be redeemed, so that they could change, breaking the anti-hero mold entirely. In the end, they’re closer to Ted Lasso.
Though it’s hard to tell if this was always the direction Kelly and Schneider wanted to take, especially because it’s become clear in the last few weeks that the show was likely canceled instead of ended willfully as several complaints about Kelly and Schneider’s abusive behavior on set got leaked to the public. To me, it feels more like we’re breaking the fourth wall here. Brooke and Cary’s redemption is another distorted story Kelly and Schneider are themselves clinging to. And maybe we’re all clinging to it. Without it, our reality doesn’t work.
B Plot
Question: What’s your favorite cover used in a television show?
Mallika: This is hard but the first one that comes to mind is Ruby Amanfu’s cover of Meredith Brooks’ 1997 hit “Bitch” in Little Fires Everywhere. It’s played over a montage of time passing as the two main characters raise their daughters under difficult circumstances, but somehow the lyrics (“I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother, I'm a sinner, I'm a saint…”) didn’t feel too on the nose to me — maybe because the cover is slow and kind of sinister compared to the upbeat original version. Not even Ms. Olivia Pope and Reese Witherspoon once again playing a peppy suburban mom full of microaggressions could make me love this show despite having high hopes after reading the book, but I thought the use of this cover was *chefs kiss*.
Rachel: God dammit Mallika, I was going to say that one. I’m going to go with Alanis Morissette’s cover of the Yellow Jacket’s theme song “No Return” that appears as a one-off in the opening of season two, episode four. The song is so perfect on its own, but Alanis’ voice makes it feel even more haunting and off-kilter. I’m a sucker for covers of theme songs by famous artists that randomly appear in the TV show. Like in the final seasons of Weeds, when they had a different artist cover that catchy “Little Boxes” theme for every episode. They had Death Cab for Cutie, The Shins, Lincoln Park, Elvis Costello, Angelique Kidjo, and even freaking Billy Bob Thorton do a cover. It was the greatest bit of all time.
C Plot
We’re so behind on The Bear and we KNOW that but 1) we’ll talk about it in the coming weeks 2) Mallika went to the sandwich shop where it was filmed in Chicago and is telling a lot of people who don’t care about that experience and 3) to the fans who ship Syd and Carmy, Jeremy Allen White says enough!
Allison Mack was released from prison after serving two years for her role in the NXIVM sex cult. That means something to you if you watched HBO’s The Vow or, of course, Smallville because as the subjects of the HBO documentary constantly reminded us, she was an extremely famous actress on an extremely famous CW show and don’t you forget it.
Ron DeSantis used Cillian Murphy’s Peaky Blinders character Thomas Shelby among others in a homophobic (and weird) campaign ad but the team behind the Netflix show was NOT having it!! They posted a message on Twitter condemning the video. Love that, but also RIP Twitter — we’re trying out Threads but we’re skeptical.
Daniel Radcliffe must have read last week’s issue of our newsletter (we love our fans) and responded: He’s not seeking out an appearance on Max’s Harry Potter reboot. “But I do wish them, obviously, all the luck in the world and I'm very excited to have that torch passed,” he says, which is what Rachel and Mallika say each week when their turn writing this newsletter is done.