Television Is Growing Up Again, and That’s a Good Thing

One of the great joys of made-to-stream television is that it allows artists to make whatever they want. Have an idea for a wacky sitcom about a talking horse living in Hollywood? Great. Want to revisit a cult sketch movie about overgrown summer camp counsellors on their last day of camp? Let’s make it eight episodes. For a while, it seemed like television was becoming a free-for-all — a siren call to our basest senses of humour and most childish selves; if the adults of the Big Bad Networks weren’t watching, let’s see what madness we could get up to. It’s no surprise Adam Sandler signed such a lucrative Netflix deal.

And yet, this month’s slate of television premieres — on Netflix and Amazon in particular — are tributes to the great freedom of being a bonafide grown-up.

The first among them is Catastrophe, whose third season launched at the end of April (though it actually aired earlier this winter in the UK, so you might already have seen it). The show stars and is written by Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan, two wildly funny 40-somethings whose humour is mined from their wealth of life experience (and not, unlike other slacker shows of the moment, their lack of it). In fact, Catastrophe’s very premise is about two reasonable adults making a thoughtful, considered decision when faced with an unexpected problem; in the pilot episode, Rob and Sharon (also their names on the show) meet, Sharon gets pregnant, and, realizing this might be their only chance at a family for both of them, they decide to have and raise the baby together.

Delaney and Horgan carry the show. Their chemistry together is remarkable, and it’s derived from the fact that their characters are drawn as real people.

In last year’s second season, the show jumped ahead a few years to their life with two children, a house, a pair of unfulfilling careers and a subsequently rocky marriage. And that’s roughly where we find them again at the start of the third season. Nothing has been either solved or blown up. Life, as in real life, proceeds apace.

We learn a similar lesson at the beginning of the second season of Master of None, Aziz Ansari’s excellent show about being being single and modestly successful and suddenly in your mid-30s (not unlike Aziz Ansari). Having lost what might have been the love of his life — or not — Ansari’s Dev finds himself on a soul-searching trip through Italy, where he’s trying to ease the pain of heartache and professional disappointment.

But Master of None has never been a show that allows much time for childlike anguish. Tonally, it’s confident and mature, and unafraid to tackle issues most other shows — especially shows about younger people, like Girls or Love or basically any network sitcom — wouldn’t dream of. The world is hard, and other people — whether that’s the characters’ immigrant parents, their LGBTQ best friends, or their partners, whose problems they don’t always manage to fully understand — have it harder. So when we meet Dev alone in Italy, it’s not an escapist fantasy. He is, instead, a grown man lost in his own world — a living embodiment of the idea that “wherever you are, there you are,” otherwise known as the great secret of getting older.

This is also the problem faced by the title character (played by Ellie Kemper) in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which begins its third season on Netflix this month. In the first season, we met Kimmy after being rescued from a bunker where she spent much of her early adulthood; she moves to New York, finds a job and an eccentric roommate, and begins the process of literally making up for lost time. Two seasons later, Kimmy has matured immeasurably. She’s loved and lost, and become wizened to the rhythms of New York City. She’s gone to therapy to deal with her (not-as-funny- as-the-show-wants-it-to-be) trauma. While the premise of the show was originally to see the world through her unreasonably wide eyes — the quintessential childish naif — the inevitable has happened: Kimmy Schmidt, both the character and the show, has grown up. And when it comes to our nightly viewing habits so, it seems, should we.