The Other Two
It seems like The Other Two has a severe case of Maisel-itis. This is a unique condition that I have diagnosed among streaming shows that get a bunch of critical love and some popularity, and the result is that the laissez-faire executives at those streaming companies then allow the creatives to do whatever they want. That results in strange shifts in tone and, most notably, a rise in episode length that directly correlates to a dip in quality.
I named it after The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which went from a great show that deserved an Emmy to a good show that deserved to be nominated for Emmys to a horrible show I can’t even bring myself to finish. This wasn’t the first series to suffer like this (think about every non-network Ryan Murphy show just about ever), but it’s certainly one of the most egregious.
Which brings me to the final two episodes of The Other Two, which will be all we ever get because Max just canceled it. (What a weird thing to say. It’s like the vacation I never got to go on with my ex-boyfriend, also named Max.) When I opened the finale to watch it and saw it clocked in at about 45 minutes, I thought, What in the Ted Lasso’s never-ending good-bye is this mess? But really, it’s been every episode this season that has been too long. Remember, The Other Two was originally on Comedy Central, where episodes were a brisk 22 minutes, a standard 30-minute slot with commercials. Season two was also green-lit by Comedy Central before moving to HBO Max. Every episode this season, if I recall correctly, has topped 30 minutes, and for almost every episode at about the 22-minute mark, I was looking at my watch wondering why the episode hadn’t wrapped up yet.
This is not to say that The Other Two is a bad show. It’s still one of my favorites, and I love that it has a totally unique, totally queer, totally shirtless-Lance-all-the-time outlook on the world. But like with so many other shows with Maisel-itis, it starts to resemble a bag of potato chips. It looks all pretty and big and delicious on the outside, but when you open it up you realize that half of what is inside is just emptiness.
The ninth episode is a perfect example of this. In it, we see both Cary and Brooke hitting rock bottom. For Cary, it’s having to do a New York Times profile of a Friday night out with his friends and boyfriend, but he doesn’t have any friends left now that he pissed off Curtis and his gaggle of gays. (Yes, much like a group of otters is a raft, and a group of crows is a murder, a group of gays is a gaggle.) This comes about because he’s trying desperately to win an Oscar to make himself seem worthwhile. To the world? No. To himself? Yes.
He doesn’t want to wait to build his career up to it; he wants to skip all the steps. He gets Shuli to make him into leading-man material by having paparazzi snap pictures of him jogging with no underwear in gray sweatpants. This is officially called “pulling a Theroux.†Then he gets his mom to fund the movie and tasks his long-suffering agent to find a director for his gay Albert Einstein project. Like with everything this season, this process has too many steps. The same happens again when he’s hanging out at the gay bar. First, we meet his ragtag group of friends, including his old boss and his old agent (the always delightful Richard Kind). Then Edie Falco shows up, then he runs into Curtis, then he goes to have Brokeback sex with his Method-actor boyfriend in a tent in the park. (Just like in the movie, Cary only uses one glob of spit as lube. I’m sorry, but God did not create enough Boy Butter to get Cary’s pepper grinder into that skinny little twink of a boyfriend.)
It’s just all too much. If we only had 22 minutes again (heck, I’d even go to 28), we’d have to shave some of this off. We could still have all the jokes and we could still have the added pathos that this season was going for, but it would all be tighter, it would all be better, it would all gleam just a little bit more. We’re not changing the recipe for the chips that you love, we’re just taking all the air out of the bag.
This goes doubly for Brooke’s story line in this episode. She’s convinced that Lance used a publicist to become People’s Sexiest Man Alive, so she is going to break into his house to prove it. She’s going to break into his house multiple times in multiple disguises to steal multiple phones and set multiple fires. Yes, there is something about how both of them become so dogged in their quests for petty things, but can’t we streamline this all a bit? Couldn’t we have felt the same way if Brooke broke in only twice? Or what if she broke in three times, but once she didn’t have to have a footrace with Lance and ended up locked in the utility room of a weird building? Instead, this felt like peel-and-eat shrimp: There is a lot of great, great stuff in there, but it’s hard to enjoy it when you have a big pile of fish heads and scales and shit sitting right in front of you.
I don’t mind the finale being longer — it did have lots of story ground to cover — but again, it was all a little too much, a little too long. By the time Cary gets to his agent’s brother’s house in the Hamptons (where their mother is dying), we get the point, and so does Cary. But he breaks down again in the morning: He has to deal with getting out of the house, he has to show up at Curtis’s, he has to walk along the beach. I like this journey, I like this whole journey, but like the world’s longest flight of stairs, there was one step too many.
I feel the same way about Cary’s boyfriend, whom he finally breaks up with. By the time he’s found wandering the interstate with an Australian accent and no idea who he is because he doesn’t have a role, what was once an amazing gag has been stretched so thin we’d know it had been on Ozempic. Again: The gag great, the final reveal great, that it lasted for about eight of the ten episodes, well, a little too much. Oh, and the flashback at the beginning? Yeah, we know there were better days for Cary and Brooke. We saw them! We saw 20 episodes of them. We don’t need another five minutes at the top of the hour to remind us.
I’ll give the writers leeway for giving Brooke more time. Not only did she and Lance have to get back together, she also had to sacrifice herself for the sake of her mother’s and brother’s careers for making mistakes she warned them about. In Chase’s case, it was giving away free therapy for album sales; for her mom, it was tweeting about Streeter’s enormous junk. (His last name isn’t Peters for no reason, people.)
In conversations with others, though, Brooke and Cary got their real illumination. When he sees Curtis, he tells Cary, “You wanted to be the most famous actor in the world so that everyone would love you and be impressed by you and also scared of you and never judge you in any way because they’re in awe of you. It’s all any of us want.†Yes, that is what drives people, at least people like Cary and Curtis, to get famous, and it seems to be working for them. But Cary finally learns there is something more important than work, that he needs to have friends, he needs to rent random Vrbos on a whim, he needs to then stroll on the beach and meet high-end gays, because these one-bedroom gays he’s been hanging out with thus far are not it. Just kidding. They watch Survivor. I’d totally hang with those gays.
Brooke gets her big speech from Lance just before they make out in the rain and he takes her back, something that Curtis just refused to do with Cary. Lance says, “Who cares if your job is dumb sometimes? You love it. I bet your mom was scared tonight, and maybe Chase and you were there.†Yes, after reporters came for Pat and Chase, Brooke went on the real actual news, gave up her Peabody Award, and took the fall so that they could stay famous. Yes, she’s no longer their manager, but she’ll find something else. So will Cary. So will all the Dubeks. They’ll keep trudging on in the fake-ass Applebee’s that they call life. It seems like they’ve all realized that their life isn’t normal, but it’s the one they have, and they’re going to try to make the most of it, be themselves, and keep perspective.
Lance’s big speech is all about how, yes, everyone’s jobs suck a little bit, even his. He hated it so much he hired a publicist to be the Sexiest Man Alive because he needed that spark back. It’s like in the finale we learned that the entertainment industry isn’t worse than any other industry. But does the show really believe that? This whole season has been trashing “industry†people, their parties, the way they work, how shallow they are, etc., etc., etc. Then they’re humanized a bit by Cary’s agent, who isn’t just playing in the Hamptons. They’re humanized by Brooke giving it all away for her family. They’re humanized by Lance saying their job isn’t the only one that’s horrible.
So we’re just supposed to forget about the party where Brooke is invisible because she’s no longer in the industry? We’re supposed to forget about the assholes at Disney who made Globby to appease their gay fans without actually giving them anything? We’re supposed to forget that show creators Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider are supposedly as toxic on set as Cary and Brooke were in the fictional world? It’s weird that this show, made by people in the industry, starring people in the industry, all of them clearing those industry checks, all hate it so much. If it’s so bad, why stay? Is it worse than other jobs or just the same? Does anyone working on this show, who presumably have never worked as a nurse or a fake Applebee’s waitress, really know that? We’re getting mixed messages here. Yes, I loved that The Other Two gave us more than two dimensions of Cary and Brooke (and Drew Tarver and Heléne York did an exceptional job this season), but in the end, the show lost a bit of focus, a bit of zip, and originality.