The Other Two, a show following the much older brother and sister of newly minted pop sensation and “next big white kid†Chase Dreams (real life Tik Tok celeb Case Walker), is the buddy comedy of my dreams and the rightful heir to the Broad City throne. The show comes from the minds of SNL alums Sarah Schneider and Chris Kelly, and boasts a Lorne Michaels executive-producer credit. With a jokes-per-minute rate so high it requires a rewatch just to make sure you’ve caught everything, and strong performances from relative television newcomers, the show charges out of the gate self-assured and with a surprising amount of heart.
Cary (Drew Tarver, Bajillion Dollar Properties) and Brooke (Heléne Yorke, Masters of Sex) are aimless millennials barely surviving in New York. Cary is an “actor†(read: waiter) who we meet in his audition for “man who smells fart at party.†He’s sarcastic and bitter and hopelessly in love with his roommate, who claims to be straight despite periodically making out with Cary while watching reruns of Survivor. Brooke is a realtor with no home, who’s sleeping on an air mattress in one of the apartments her agency is showing after leaving her boyfriend of five years.
The sudden success of Brooke and Cary’s 13-year-old brother Chase Dreams for his song “I Wanna Marry U at Recess†has left them confronting their own shortcomings as creatives and fully formed adults. Cary’s day jobs — as a server with an unintentionally homophobic manager and a member of a flash-mob dance crew that performs in the park for tourists on an NYC tour bus — underscore his humiliating audition. Meanwhile, Brooke is on a mission to see 50 dicks. The first of these belongs to a perfectly cast Beck Bennett (SNL), as a man she believes to be a pilot, but turns out to be a flight attendant. She takes a taxi all the way out to a JFK motel for a quickie and lingers long after he leaves, having nowhere to go.
When Brooke and Cary finally come together, they’re on their way to meet up with Chase and their mother (an earnestly clueless Molly Shannon) for dinner. Even though their mother wears studded pleather jackets from the Candy Barn, hired a hapless opportunistic manager for Chase, and invited Brooke’s aspiring shoe-designer ex-boyfriend Lance, she isn’t exploiting her youngest son. Despite the enormous success of her youngest son, she remains single-mindedly positive and supportive of Cary’s acting career and hopeful for Brooke.
Chase’s absence at the dinner heightens the reality of his sudden fame settling into something that has longevity. His manager, Streeter (an always-flawless Ken Marino), comes in his place, acting as the first proxy between Chase and his family. When he tells them that Chase is sick in the hotel room because he ate a dozen raw eggs for lunch on Streeter’s instruction, to help “buff up†to present at the Kid’s Choice Awards (alongside Meghan Trainor, no less), all Brooke and Cary hear is that he’s participating in an awards show.
After the dinner, Brooke and Cary retire to one of Chase’s hotel rooms, filled with gift baskets from industry vultures and also Debra Messing. Here we finally get a tender moment between all the siblings as Chase enters and crawls between them in the bed to watch TV. Lying together, the three of them ground each other: Chase is genuinely excited for Cary’s commercial audition and he comments about missing their dad. The tone is sad enough that it’s implied he died, but he could have just left the family. As Chase dozes off, the reality of his fame settles in for his siblings. They watch his music video — a pitch-perfect parody of any Matty B or Jacob Sartorius type YouTube video — and it’s revealed that the midtown hotel that the Today show put them up in has Chase’s grinning face plastered across the front of the entire building.
Tarver and Yorke’s effortless chemistry drives the show, which really picks up the pace once they come together. Their banter delivers punch lines so fast you’ll miss one if you look away — but more importantly, together their characters offer an honest reflection of each other as they cope with the feeling that the world is leaving them behind. But even though my favorite scenes are the ones they play off each other, the entire episode is littered with weird little comedic breadcrumbs that give the show its fun tone: Brooke’s loser ex-boyfriend Lance shows up to her family dinner in his Foot Locker uniform and dabs when she sees that he’ll be joining them; Brooke googling “interior design how become†in her quest to find a passion. Details like these give the show the opportunity to simultaneously establish its universe and pack in the jokes.
The show is off to a great start, and has a promising season ahead. As Broad City finishes up its run and we said good-bye to Detroiters in the fall, The Other Two is poised to fill the gaping buddy-comedy void on Comedy Central. This season trots out an impressive list of guest stars, including Wanda Sykes, Champions’ Josie Totah, and Kate Berlant. Next week, we’ll see them start to grapple with the reality of Chase’s new life as a child star — and what it can give them.
The Other Two Cents
• I refuse to believe that Streeter could have been played by anyone other than Ken Marino. We stan a character-acting legend.
• “He still watches Survivor, which is like violently straight.â€
• “I think maybe he’s bisexual. It’s not 2010, those people are real now! They exist!â€
• “Why is your finger broken?†“Turns out I can’t do a backflip.â€
• “He’s talented yet he’s humble. Also sexy, but he’s a businessman. He’s 13 but an icon. The girls are horny for him and yet they respect him. And he respects them.â€
• Brooke wants to become a travel writer/travel photographer/travel agent/rapper/rap critic. Same.
• Lance’s shoe ideas: laces on the bottom, invisible shoes, edible shoes.