Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen Deliver a Twist – Variety



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Spoil alert: Do not read until you have watched the first season of "Forever", which was completely discontinued on September 14 on Amazon.

Although his first episode strives to convince us otherwise, it is impossible to talk about "Forever" without talking about his capital, Twist.

The first comedy of Matt Hubbard and Alan Yang does everything possible to attract the audience in a false sense of security, following the married couple June (Maya Rudolph) and Oscar (Fred Armisen). intermediate moments. In this respect, they succeed; The lives of June and Oscar are perfectly enjoyable, but as June realizes with growing discomfort, they could also be described as banal. Their mutual love and mutual comfort slip into a plateau where tradition turns into excuses for never growing or changing. For a while – and for longer than is frankly necessary – "Forever" sells as a two-way marital comedy.

But then, just after the month of June, eventually shoving up the courage to express his displeasure, Oscar skis into a tree and dies.

Throughout the second episode, it seems that June is trying to tackle the death of her husband. I admit that I was ready for this version of the show, if only because Rudolph is awesome and deserves a starring vehicle that allows him to show it. (And the second episode is indeed, largely thanks to her and Kym Whitley as her best friend, very well.) But June, rightly, is getting back to being the person she always thought she could be, she dies – and that's where the show really begins. June wakes up in a charming neighborhood with Oscar's ecstatic face, who can not believe her luck that they may be dead together … forever.

From there, the show tries to combine the most typical tropes of a wedding sitcom with the most supernatural that it introduces with this superior conceptual twist, to confusing effect. It's not a big sign that it takes two full episodes to get the show where it has to be to be fully itself, especially since the first season has only eight episodes in total. Nor is it great that after watching all eight, "Forever" is more confusing than not.

On the one hand, it is exactly the matrimonial comedy that it presents itself at the beginning. Even in death, Oscar and June find themselves where they left off: stuck in a routine he loves and hates more and more. Rudolph is very good at expressing June's growing frustration, especially once she's inspired to make a real change once the Catherine Keener affair – a charismatic misanthrope who wants to use her death as an opportunity to live The show sometimes sits on the idea that people have about the same problems in the afterlife as on earth, even though, in fairness, this thread is also the strongest. June and Case's reluctance to accept a monotonous eternity over Oscar's insistence that there is nothing wrong with finding and clinging to a comfortable routine is a downright effective metaphor for a marriage that television and cinema have since described.

But where the show really stumbles, it's to hide the fantastic elements of this premise. "Forever" just shows enough interest in establishing a mythology that will throw some sporadic and disparate details about life after death (or whatever it is supposed to be, which has never been everything quite clear). Oscar's best friend, Mark (Noah Robbins), for example, died in the 1970s as a teenager, which means he has been stuck in perpetual adolescence ever since. (A real nightmare.) The dead call the living people "the currents" and can haunt them by causing electrical failures and by knocking things over if they are concentrating hard enough. Sometimes, they can even drain the energy of a current to boost their own energy, because if the dead wander too far from a water source, they begin to faint.

So, it's not as if the spirits behind "Forever" had not thought about what it meant to create one's own mythology of the afterlife. Unfortunately, these clues seem more random than anything else. What makes a show like "The Good Place" – which actually shares some writers with the staff of "Forever" – is that his work is meticulous. Everything is in place for a reason. On "Forever", every new rule of the afterlife gives the impression that it's just for fun. If the show returns for another season, it would be so much better to know exactly what makes his version of the world really his own.

Comedy, 30 min. (All 8 episodes previewed for review.) First Friday, Sept. 14th on Amazon Prime.

Jeter: Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen, Catherine Keener, Noah Robbins and Kym Whitley.

Crew: Executive Producers: Alan Yang, Matt Hubbard, Tim Sarkes, Dave Becky, Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen.

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