The Studio, which aired this spring on Apple TV Plus, cleaned up in the comedy categories at this year’s Emmy Awards. The series about the inner workings of show business was co-created by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Rogen earned an Emmy for his performance in the show as the new head of a fictional Hollywood studio.
While The Studio absolutely deserved the awards it got, I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about Rogen’s other show on Apple TV Plus, Platonic.
Platonic doesn’t have the cultural caché of The Studio. There are no appearances from Martin Scorsese or Charlize Theron (there is a cameo from Jeopardy’s Ken Jennings, though).
Still, it’s one of the funniest shows airing at the moment, and yet it seems to receive no love.
Some shows on Apple TV Plus get all the attention: Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, Severance and The Studio are the big ones. Many other shows on the service seem to slide under the radar.
When you watch a show like Platonic, it seems like you’ve discovered a secret gem you can keep all to yourself. But it’s also wild to me that star-studded shows are like a dime a dozen and so easily overlooked. So overlooked, in fact, that the show isn’t even listed on Seth Rogen’s main Wikipedia page. Take Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but this is a huge omission — even his appearance as a guest judge in The Great Canadian Pottery Throwdown is mentioned. (You have to click out to his filmography page to see his credit on the show.)
Platonic, which was co-created by the husband and wife team of Nick Stoller and Francesca Delbanco, premiered in 2023 and began as a friendship comedy. Rose Byrne’s character, Sylvia, a former lawyer who now stays at home with her three school-aged kids, decides to reach out to her best friend from college, Will (Rogen), when she hears he’s getting a divorce.
Sylvia and Will spent several years estranged, a result of Sylvia’s disapproving of Will’s marriage. In the wake of his divorce, they reconcile and fall back into old habits (staying out too late, taking drugs and basically finding trouble everywhere they go in LA).
Over the course of two seasons, the friends develop a co-dependence that rubs Sylvia’s husband, Charlie (Luke Macfarlane), the wrong way. Partly because he’s always left out, partly because Sylvia had been leading a balanced, stable life before Will reentered her orbit, and now she’s deprioritizing spending time at home. (This is one of those shows where, as a parent, I must suspend my disbelief and stop asking, “Who is watching the kids right now?”)
When two friends cannot help but enable each other to make bad decisions, hilarity ensues. But that’s only one element. The show is also clearly about Sylvia (and, to a lesser degree, Charlie) in midlife crisis mode, though it never explicitly states that fact.
Sylvia, now in her mid-40s, is torn between her loving home life and the dopamine rush of getting up to no good with Will. The trouble is, it’s hard pretending you can hang like you’re in your 20s again when you’ve got to pack lunches, do the school run and get dinner on the table. After giving up her own career, Sylvia is desperate to find something fulfilling. Short of that, she at least wants to have some fun outside the boundaries of her home life. Reconnecting with her best friend from college makes her feel more alive than she has in years.
Charlie, her husband, goes through his own transformation, abruptly quitting his job and trying to become a novelist — and insisting on wearing a fedora for inspiration.
While Charlie’s midlife crisis feels more like a caricature, a man desperate for change and looking for approval, Sylvia’s has been ongoing and subtle. She tries to reinvent herself professionally as an event planner, but she’s jeopardizing her success by letting herself become too involved in Will’s personal life.
In season 1, Sylvia seemed to enjoy letting Will distract her from her boring routine. In season 2, she’s become a self-saboteur, trying to blow up everything good in her life.
Platonic may never get recognized the way that The Studio has. And even though they’re very different shows, they’re not necessarily meant for different audiences. In fact, I’ll admit that I only started watching Platonic after I finished the first season of The Studio. I was once Seth Rogen-agnostic, but now I find myself a devotee of his work, so I inhaled every available episode of Platonic as fast as I could.
Season 2 has one more episode before it wraps up next week. There’s no better time to binge this great show that managed to stay under the radar, overshadowed by bigger hits.
