Go Watch Adults
Bargain Bin No. 10 - I Mean It, Do It Right Now
Hi all! After more than a month (!) of no new Bargain Bin, the newsletter makes its grand return to your inbox, more trivial and silly than ever before. I don’t know if you’ve missed your weekly(ish) dose of nonsense and cultural discourse in newsletter form, frankly that’s none of my business. We live in a society and it’s incumbent on you to respect norms of politeness and courtesy and pretend like you read these regardless. So please excuse my brief hiatus and trust that I will not only be a more consistent presence in your inbox from now on, but will also be delivering this piping hot garbage at a level of quality hitherto unknown.
In the words of one of the 21st century’s great wordsmiths, Sorry 4 The Wait
… and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
As keen readers will know, I’m obsessed with sitcoms. But, in the modern day of the post-streaming-boom media landscape, it’s slim pickings as far as truly great sitcoms go.
Network television, which is the format that nurtured the genre since its inception in the mid 20th century, is now largely a platform for public access children’s shows and political talking heads that you occasionally watch at your parents’ house. Perhaps as a result, (or so I’m positing, in a sort of hedged and aloof way) the mainstream sitcom has had a similar decline. Since the winding down of the major network sitcoms of the 2000’s and 2010’s like New Girl (aired until 2018) How I Met Your Mother (aired until 2014) and Modern Family (aired until 2020) there hasn’t really been a new crop. But there are new green shoots for the genre.
There’s been some false starts since then. Notably, Mindy Kaling’s Sex Lives of College Girls, which had its strengths, but two seasons in is already starting to run out of steam. Renee Rapp is sensational as a hypertalented, hypercompetent, hyperwealthy WASP heiress whose on-paper impressiveness belies the fact that she’s unable to foster significant personal connections outside her immediate family. Basically, she’s a haughty bitch, whose white- hot ego is slowly tempered by her eccentric suitemates (including Pauline Chalamet, who is the other standout of the show) at a New England liberal arts college. Together the four suitemates figure out how to construct new identities for themselves in a new environment. They also have a lot of sex, hence the name. It’s a pretty tidy premise for a show, but despite being occasionally very solid it has a fair few nagging issues that are structural enough that they become hard to ignore as you keep up with the show. First of all, with ALL due respect to the woman who wrote some of the best the Office episodes of all time –
– The writing of SLoCG, feels decidedly like what a 40- something woman thinks 18 year olds sound like. The result is dialogue that feels like a bad impression of what a college freshman might’ve spoken like in 2014, except the show is set in the early 2020’s. This might not be a load-bearing issue, except the show really sells itself on the fact that it’s a raw depiction of young people doing young people shit. As a result, it feels really weird that everyone shares this strangely millennial language.
There’s other weaknesses as well, and this, along with the fact that Renee Rapp left the project in season 2, makes the entire thing feel past its best.
But there are other more successful attempts.
The closest we’ve gotten in the past years, and in my opinion a show which has already cemented itself as a likely future classic, is Quinta Brunson’s Abbott Elementary, a classic workplace comedy set in a Philadelphia public elementary school. This type of show has been a staple since The Office’s success in the early 2000s, and is particularly prominent on NBC. But while the workplace comedy slot is now filled, there’s another type of classic sitcom which is glaringly absent. I’m talking about the 20-something-group-of-friends-trying-to-make-it-in-the-big-city genre. This particular type of sitcom was a constant from at least the 80’s, and most recently New Girl held the title of reigning representative. But since the show’s finale 7 years ago, there haven’t really been any serious attempts to replace it.
Until now. Adults is an FX series with a first season of 8 20-minute episodes which follows, as you might have guessed, a group of 20-somethings trying to make it in the big city.
The show sits somewhere on a spectrum between New Girl and Broad City
Issa is a standout, and Amita Rao’s performance is so good that you don’t even mind that she’s effectively doing an Ilana Glazer impression.
The characters feel worn in from the outset, and each have very clearly defined personalities without falling into archetypes.
Unlike many shows about ‘young people,’ Adults has a far stronger grasp on the actual cultural touchstones, idioms, idiosyncrasies and financial situations of most young cosmopolitan grads.
But what exactly is it that makes this show so fucking good? Glad I asked.
New Yuck City
I once stepped in a puddle on my way home from a bar shift in December in London. Somewhere north of 2am-ish, I got back to my disgusting flat, took off my clothes without even hitting the lights, crawled into my nasty ass bed with my unwashed sheets and fell asleep. When I got up the next morning I looked over at my shoes and saw they were covered in a thick black slick substance.
I didn’t have another pair, so I ended up wearing them around all day and when I took them off at my girlfriend’s apartment she literally gagged and made me throw away my socks. To this day I do not know what that mystery black puddle was.
Said girlfriend also worked at a bar around this time. At said bar, she once had to tell a couple to stop having sex. Not in a bathroom either, in the MIDDLE of the bar. During breaks, she would go across the street to buy a bag of chips from Aldi and eat them on the sidewalk because the place didn’t let employees eat the food from the kitchen without paying full price. And even if they would have offered the employees food, that place was teeming with rats.
Now, I’d spend most of my time at her place because, as I mentioned, my apartment was disgusting. And while her place was a really nice apartment, it had a persistent issue of the kitchen sink not draining. After which, it would, for a period, smell very bad and emanate a brownish ooze. Me and one of her flatmates plunged, yielding nothing but more brown goo, with bits like crushed up damp twigs. We plunged it, snaked it, poured acid down it, and yet it continued to produce brown goo.
What’s the point of these stories? The point is, that London is nasty. London is wonderful, truly it’s one of the best cities on Earth. I’ve got at least three friends who love it so much they categorically refuse to entertain the idea of ever moving anywhere else, it’s magnetic, it pulls you in because it’s a shrieking cavalcade, and you’re desperate to see what all the fuss is about. The other metaphor I’d use to describe it, I suppose, is that it’s a shower drain, where people swirl closer and closer until they get tangled up in a greasy wad of old hair and they can never leave.
It’s super gross, there’s just too much going on for it not to be. And yet, every person I meet seems to agree that London is 100 times nicer than NYC. Adults leans into that side of New York from the very first scene. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it involves public transport, confrontational masturbation and a lot of screaming. It feels true to the masochism of cosmopolitan living in a way that most other sitcoms just aren’t.
It’s a show that doesn’t just acknowledge that big cities are fundamentally, kinda gross, but revels in it.
Funemployment
‘Your job’s a joke, you’re broke’ is a line from the theme song of Friends. And yeah, a major part of most people’s lives in their 20’s is obviously making ends meet, or even, (say it quietly) doing something worthwhile with your career. Thing is, the very concept of a job is fundamentally different now than it was even when a more recent show like New Girl was airing.
Take the neighbourhoods in which the staple New York sitcoms are set. Friends is set in Manhattan, and the characters live in apartments that only generational wealth or a job in finance would be able to secure today. How I Met Your Mother starts to show the changing times with one of the principal cast members moving to Brooklyn, two others saddling themselves with debt to buy a structurally unsound apartment in an undesirable neighbourhood, and it being explicitly stated that the only reason Ted can afford to live on the Upper West Side is because of rent control.
By the time Adults is set, the prospect of securing a place in Brooklyn seems much too aspirational. Not only do the characters of the show live further from the center of New York, (Queens to be specific) but they sublet from one of the gang’s parents who actually own the house. And yet, some of them still have to share rooms. One of the characters, Paul Baker, describes moving to New York from Canada, maybe chasing the dream of a Friends-like New York experience, only to end up sleeping on a friend’s floor on a towel and getting scabies from said towel. Adults is still a show about the joys of sharing an apartment with your best friends in your twenties, but it never condescends to pretend like any normal person in their 20’s could actually do that in the same way that those earlier shows presented it, as a choice borne of the desire to be close to your friends, and not the financial necessity of living like Victorian mill-workers, i.e. two to a bedroom.
The job situation isn’t much better. Far from the traditional formula where each character has an assigned and defined ‘career’ that they’re following (Ted’s an architect, Monica’s a chef, Ross is a paleontologist) the characters of Adults just sort of… work, doing something vague and unfulfilling, mostly composed of absentmindedly nodding along in zoom meetings. Or in the case of the character Samir, gig-work as a delivery driver. In earlier iterations of this genre, having a job is often more about attaining some sort of emblem of middle-class status, or in rare cases about self-fulfillment and chasing your passions. Sure, these sitcoms feature characters who are frustrated by their jobs, but they’re typically not scrambling to feed themselves or obtain shelter.
‘Are You a Lil’ Fruity?’
Friends ends with Monica and Chandler moving to the suburbs to raise their kids in a house with a picket fence. Ross and Rachel SCANDALOUSLY have a child out of wedlock, but also end up together in heterosexual monogamous bliss. The entire premise of HIMYM is centered around the attainment of that same ideal. New Girl, too, ends with each of the (all straight) characters neatly paired off, in the burbs, with kids. And that’s lovely, for each of these shows those felt like very earned and legitimate endings for those characters.
But at the same time, it would feel really out of pocket to have a show about a group of 20-something friends in a major coastal American city in 2025 where that was the outlined trajectory, or even a desired outcome for most of the characters.
And in Adults, it’s not! Feeld, polygamy, bi characters, gay characters, we’ve got it all, even sex work! Yet, Adults isn’t a sort of over-the-top bacchanal meant to drill down the fact that the kids are all queer nowadays donchaknow. It’s more just a true-to-fact representation of the demographics of young cosmopolitan communities. And not only those communities. Adults does a good job of establishing that it’s not just that the core cast of ‘young people’ that is fundamentally different from previous generations of sitcoms, but the environment around them too, as attested by the flirty queer gun store clerk, who hits on one of our (very hot) main characters in a thick New York drawl ‘Cause if you were a lil’ frooty, I’d buy ya gun and getcha numbah.’
The point is…
That Adults is a really, really good show, not because it reinvents… really anything. It’s a really good show because it clings tightly to the expectations of all of us who have grown up loving the classic group-of-friends-in-a-big-city sitcoms. And, rather than try to lampoon a genre, or show that it’s smarter, it recognises that a lot of the tropes of those shows work, whilst updating them for a new context which it genuinely understands and therefore does not need to turn into a gimmick.
Thanks for reading as usual.