Sometimes the effort to give an hour-long special an overarching theme feels strained, and in Roy Wood Jr.’s Lonely Flowers, it looks at first like that effort might not entirely pay off. Wood never lets the hour feel slow or unmotivated, but his new special is specifically about loneliness and human connection, and occasionally, the weight of that theme feels almost too heavy for the jokes there to support it. A hard pivot into the challenges of intimate emotional connection is a tough comedic bedfellow for a joke about the mechanics of an orgy. If the entire hour were built that way, Lonely Flowers would be a typically strong Roy Wood Jr. special with just a touch too much emphasis on a theme it doesn’t always justify. But the first 45 minutes of Lonely Flowers are all about the buildup. They allow Wood to lay the groundwork for the story he really wants to tell: his closer, which is such a captivating 15-minute capper that the entire special suddenly clicks into mesmerizing, brilliant focus.
Wood’s topic, signaled by the special’s title, is the pervasive sense that people have lost opportunities to connect with one another, and his argument is that losing even casual personal interactions has fueled a larger sense of social disorder. In typical Wood style, he’s both eloquent and heartfelt as he lays out the thesis: Without small interactions like grocery-checkout conversations and casual hobby clubs, it’s gotten easier for people to slide into violence and chaos. Behind him, the set design is a none-too-subtle reminder of the larger point. Wood may be telling a joke about buying shoes at Foot Locker or the nostalgic weight of online account-security questions, but occasionally a wide shot pops up to remind viewers of the full-length backdrop behind him: a sunset-toned image of a hill with a single, darkly silhouetted flower at the top.
It’s not that the material throughout is ill-suited to that theme. Wood’s investment in the idea is complete and convincingly sincere, and it allows the jokes to fit into variations of his premise even when he has to do some jostling to make them work. The joke about Foot Locker is ostensibly about how much better it is to have an older employee help him buy shoes, because the younger employees try to downplay Wood’s age and end up only making him feel worse. But Wood can shade in his underlying concept at the same time: that this interaction with this employee is a way to feel seen and understood, even when it’s relatively brief and impersonal. A joke about a photographer he once hired for a gig can also be a story about giving people a chance; a section about how not all friendships are transferable to different situations is a joke about the challenge of finding new connections in adulthood.
Still, Lonely Flowers is shaped by its noticeable transitions. The space between each joke section becomes a palpable downshift into Wood’s more serious mode, with each of them insistent on returning to the same thought. “You have to be intentional about happiness, the same way you do cardio or anything else you do by creating an environment for yourself,” he says in one of these stretches. “Customer service changed the way you related to one another, and our world changed,” he says in another. “We lost connection.” “Everybody in this room, I guarantee you, has at least one person you’ve been meaning to call, but you still ain’t call them. You’ve gotta make a change,” he says later.
Although the transitions can feel blunt, most of the jokes have their own specific, tangible inner worlds, often buoyed by Wood’s ability to act out individual characters and different tones. He’s particularly observant about people with everyday retail jobs or characters who get stuck watching someone else veer off into some heightened emotional scenario. At times Wood is the problem element of his own story — he’s the one being catapulted into bad feelings when he has to answer an overly intimate account-security question, and he’s the one needing help from a very specific kind of employee at Foot Locker. But he’s even better when he slides into the point of view of the employee in those interactions, acting out the nervous energy of a private chef making omelettes at a weeklong sex vacation, the disdain of a grocery-store clerk who has to fix a self-checkout machine, or the inner monologue of a gun-store cashier responding to someone who wants to buy seven shotguns. Each time they have the satisfying pop of an instantly recognizable new person, with a whole emotional world visible in the way they shake a mimed frying pan or the posture of their crossed arms.
In the beginning, those characters are invented, and they work in a generally abstract political mode. The imagined gun-store cashier is explicitly about social connections, but it’s more broadly about gun control; a stretch on videos of fast-food-chain fights is ultimately a joke about how underappreciated and underpaid hourly workers are in this country. (What a shift from Wood’s 2019 special, No One Loves You, which includes a whole paean to the trustworthiness of McDonald’s.) But as the special develops, the material moves closer to home. Wood talks about his mother, who hasn’t retired from her job largely because she does not want to lose that connection to the world. He touches briefly on his time on The Daily Show, including a comment about a period when he’d been positioned as the show’s next host. “‘Relax,’” he tells his mom. “‘I just talked to Trevor Noah. He’s getting ready to quit the show. I’m going to be the host! You can relax, mama. You can stop.’ I had to call my mama back six months later. ‘You didn’t quit yet, did you? Okay, good. Gotta go to plan B over here.’”
Even then, in the material about his mom and the joke that follows about Wood being invited to a weeklong sex vacation, Lonely Flowers is missing something at its center. In an hour about the challenge and importance of connecting with other people, Wood mostly dodges around his own place in that theme, his own difficulty feeling close to someone. But when the closer finally arrives, it’s like a switch has flipped. The ending is a long story about a woman Wood has been dating and the period when he’s first introduced to her son. The three of them go to see a kid’s theater performance by a man who puts on an elaborate, immersive bubble show, and Wood describes his skepticism about the act slowly transforming into rapt attention. “Oh shit,” Wood says as he describes the bubble man dying an enormous bubble blue and green and then turning on a fan so that it rotates like the globe. “This is worth $74 and fees.”
As Wood narrates how shocked he is by this children’s bubble show, the joke changes, moving from Wood’s awe at this production into his fascination with the bubble man’s life and how moving it is that he’s found a way to connect with people through his art. When Wood realizes that the bubble man has also found a life partner who gets him on this intense, artistic level, the joke at last reveals the idea that the special has been dancing around the entire time. Yes, it’s about widespread social disconnection, and yes, it’s about the big political ramifications of a world where people no longer interact face-to-face. But mostly it’s about Wood’s own loneliness and the profound discovery that being around someone else doesn’t necessarily mean feeling seen and understood. It transforms Lonely Flowers from something impersonal to something more intimate and indelible.