Maya Rudolph can, with just a look, convey the sudden onset of total despair. In perhaps her most famous scene, in the movie “Bridesmaids,” her character, beset by food poisoning, defecates in the middle of the street while wearing a wedding dress, and her face settles into a blank mask of awful resignation. Rudolph makes a similar face at several points during the première of “Forever,” an eight-episode series, on Amazon, about the comforting and stultifying familiarity of marriage. The first time it appears is at the end of a clever opening montage that shows the arc of her relationship with her husband, Oscar (Fred Armisen), from their first meeting to their nth-consecutive lake-house vacation. As Oscar serves her yet another plate of recently caught trout—a meal that used to delight her—June (Rudolph) stares straight ahead into a distance that appears to stretch miles. Later in the episode, the look reappears, this time after she asks him, “Don’t you ever wonder what the purpose of everything is?” He responds that he doesn’t, as if considering such a thing for the first time.
“Forever,” which was created by Alan Yang (the co-creator of “Master of None”) and Matt Hubbard (a writer and producer on “30 Rock” and “Parks and Recreation”), appears, at first, to be covering well-trodden ground. Armisen seems to be trapped in a sketch, channelling one of his dim normcore husband characters from “Portlandia,” and the show begins modestly, as a satirical look at early-middle-age domesticity gone gently awry. In the première, during a ski trip that Oscar and June take to shake things up, a punk kid in their beginner class mocks them, calling them poor. “Hey, we’re upper middle class,” Oscar replies. “I’m a dentist.” June works in a cubicle at a timeshare company and drinks rosé. They drive a Volvo and live in a well-decorated house in a blandly nice neighborhood. The show has a clean, airless, sun-sterilized, Southern California look—as if Oscar and June are trapped under glass, and we are meant to study these specimens of modern life from a pitying remove.
It’s Rudolph’s performance, though, that hints at the show’s grander ambitions. June is clever and bold and gloriously profane—a real and vibrant person hidden beneath pastel sweaters and a boring job. As she struggles through a Jillian Michaels workout video in her living room, she mutters, “Fuck you, Jillian.” To the jerk tween on the ski slopes, she shouts, “Why don’t you suck my dick?” and then pushes him to the ground. Oscar, too, turns out to be more than he seems—not merely a nice guy but the kind of maddening “nice guy” whose cruelty resides in his passive aggressiveness and his silences, in all the things he can’t or won’t say. A few episodes in, Catherine Keener moves in next door, becoming a kind of manic pixie dream adult woman for June, who is looking for a spark, and a companion on a path toward a new and more fulfilling life. As June and Oscar drift apart, we see that sweet people, and perhaps even especially sweet people, can harbor powerful resentments and do surprisingly mean things to one another.
If all this sounds terribly vague, it’s because the plot of “Forever” gets twisty, and is best left unspoiled. Yet the show’s narrative is in some ways less important than its themes, which are explored in funny and precise minor moments. In the second episode, June drinks wine with her friend Sharon (a very funny Kym Whitley) and ruminates on her sadness. “You’ve got to tell the universe what you want, so it will know what to give back to you,” Sharon tells her, quoting from the Instagram account of Britney Spears. June laughs, and then asks how Britney is doing these days. “Either really good or really terrible,” Sharon responds. “I can’t tell.” It’s a joke about the kind of desperate happiness that most people—famous or otherwise, and famously troubled or otherwise—attempt to convey on social media, and, more generally, about the disconnect between how much information we have about people and how little we truly know. That’s true of the celebrities who populate our social-media accounts and the partners who share our beds.
This all sounds gloomy, but “Forever” ’s essential view of the world is hopeful, even when tackling issues of real emotional weight. Rudolph and Armisen, who performed together for years on “Saturday Night Live,” have a playful chemistry and help us believe that June and Oscar, in their lowest moments, are still in this weird thing together. The same holds for minor characters: the show is especially wise about the surprising roles that strangers can play in one another’s lives. A pastor invites a woman to his church’s grief-counselling group. An employee at a big-box store takes the time to talk a customer through a crisis. A guy on the Internet makes a YouTube tutorial to teach people how to set up a router. Modern life is full of these small kindnesses, the show suggests, even in this moment of mass cultural discord.
“Forever” is also a profound exploration of the wondrous perils of falling in love. In one thread, it explores a budding romance between a teen-age boy and an older woman, which springs from their their shared love of seventies rock and roll and settles, slowly, into friendship. Even the season’s standout moment occurs outside of the main plot: in a gorgeous, wistful bottle episode that digs into the vibe of Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy, two young real-estate agents (played by Hong Chau and Jason Mitchell) fall in love in the course of a series of encounters, but can never break free of their other entanglements.
These stories drift around June and Oscar, showing different ways that two people might love each other. Together, the pair faces common questions in an uncommon situation: How long should two people be together? What does it mean to share a space, or a life, with someone? What does happiness look like? And, more simply, how are they doing? Either really good or really terrible—it’s hard to tell.
Sourse: newyorker.com
