The eternal, beautiful stasis of the twentysomething hangout sitcom

Happy Monday, Episodes pals! This week, we've got takes on FX's Adults and Prime Video's The Love Hypothesis, as well as our usual collection of other bibs and bobs. Remember: If you subscribe, you'll get this newsletter in your inbox every Monday!

FX's Adults and how people in their 20s have always been like that

Recently, the YouTube algorithm, having sussed out that I am an Xennial cusper who works closely with a Zillennial cusper, has started serving me lots of "God, aren't twentysomethings fucking stupid??" content. Now, this is wrongheaded on a bunch of levels, including the fact that Lily is not, by the most technical of margins possible, a twentysomething, but I did watch some of it because I am powerless against the algorithm's sway, which is how you know I'm getting older and about to start consuming a lot of AI slop. Most of it takes the form of extremely stale jokes about how people in their 20s don't know how the world works or how they use unusual slang or whatever, and they are always shared with titles like "Gen Z Millennial translator."

Now, in a fun twist, I had no idea that video existed, but I assumed it had to exist because I, a known Xennial cusper, spent much of my own twenties and thirties being inundated with comedic sketches about how I was a buffoon who didn't know how the world worked and stared at my phone all the time or whatever. (I do look at my phone a lot.) And, indeed, the fine folks at (checks) ClickUpComedy had me covered. Ha ha, people who are 25 haven't spent a lot of time in office situations! Ha ha ha, they're so fucking stupid! They are not merely young and, therefore, the sorts of people who will share videos like "Gen X Gen Alpha translator" in 15 years!

Now, I have always maintained that the fact that "grr Millennials are so stupid and young!" hung around as a trope for far longer than Millennials were actually stupid and young because "Millennial" came to mean "a 24-year-old." And now, it's the Zoomers' turn to stand in for how annoying 24-year-olds are and have always been. You don't think young people are stupid! You just don't like that you're shut out of their world because you're getting older! You hate that you're going to die (probably)! (I have similar thoughts about the depiction of teenagers.)

While I've been pondering all of this, I've been watching the very funny FX comedy Adults, which is very clearly an attempt to make a Gen-Z New Girl/Friends, right down to how many plots from this show have direct analogues in both earlier shows. Normally, this would feel like one show ripping off and/or paying homage to its forebears, but, like, all three shows just understand what being in your 20s and (eventually) your 30s has always been? You have a lot of economic insecurity! You are surrounded by people who seem to have it figured out while you don't! You occasionally come in contact with people in their 40s, and their ways are strange and alienating!

My main complaint about Adults – beyond that the show's original pilot (see here) is kind of a mess – is that it's not making at least 18 episodes a year, but I will occasionally bump into people who are, like, "Gosh, is that how it is to be in your 20s??" Yes! And that's how it's always been to be in your 20s. Do people really forget what it was like to be young the second they turn 35? Am I the only person who managed to escape this trap? (I know I'm not. Don't tell me how cool you are.) I listen to hyperpop! I'm with it!

Like, yes, Adults depicts a version of twentysomething precariousness I'm glad I mostly escaped – except now I'm living through that very precariousness or something like it in my 40s. And I have a fucking kid. Because it only has eight-episode seasons, Adults is able to keep its characters from feeling too stable, which matches both their circumstances and what increasingly feel like my own. Will it be able to keep that going for five or six seasons, or will it eventually become like Friends and have everybody living in luxury by the end? I'm excited to find out.

One other thing: All twentysomething hangout sitcoms eventually confront the fact that the teenagers are coming. Here, for instance, is Jessica Day, Millennial icon, hanging out with known Zoomer Olivia Rodrigo. But I'm not sure I've ever seen a hangout sitcom as preoccupied by this idea as Adults. Much of the first season, indeed, is taken up by the characters' desire to return to a sort of adolescence – and also their terror every time they are confronted with actual adolescents who don't find them particularly cool or interesting. Come on in, cast of Adults! The water in the "death comes for us all" pool's warm! –Emily St. James

Boy, this was the wrong time for The Love Hypothesis to come out!

This post discusses the entire plot of The Love Hypothesis, including a discussion of sexual violence.

I'm not going to pretend that I had particularly high expectations going into The Love Hypothesis, Amazon's new adaptation of Ali Hazelwood's hit romance novel of the same title. While I'm a fan of older rom-coms, I've found that I usually struggle to connect with adaptations of more modern romance novels (Heated Rivalry very much excepted). Still, it looked profoundly goofy — like, the book is based on Reylo fanfiction and the movie stars Daisy Ridley's husband?? — in the way that might make for a fun brain-off watch.

It didn't turn out to be entirely charmless! Jaboukie Young-White was, per usual, a delight every time he was on screen, even if his role was largely thankless. And, while I didn't feel the central couple had quite enough chemistry for my taste, I did think it was nice that they did not actually resemble Rey and Kylo Ren in any way besides, like, the woman having light brown hair.

Was there a fundamental grossness of the movie's central premise — Olive, a grad student, fake-dates Adam, a professor in her department, for complicated and largely stupid reasons, then winds up catching real feelings for him? Yes, absolutely! It certainly didn't help matters that Adam was absolutely intent on humiliating his female students, to the point of making multiple young women cry with his cruelty over the course of the film. But, at least for the film's first two acts, it was easy enough to just sorta think "huh, that's not great!" and keep watching. (It didn't hurt that Lili Reinhart [Olive] and Tom Bateman [Adam] are both clearly in their thirties, rendering at least one of their implicit power imbalances kind of moot.)

And then the movie makes a sharp tonal turn: Tom, one of Olive's mentors, explicitly tells her that if she doesn't sleep with him, he'll destroy her career. It's a clear rape threat, and it's delivered with a threat not to tell anyone that it happened. Olive, visibly traumatized, refuses to talk to anyone except her best friend about what's happened. Her best friend, though, tells Adam. And so Adam storms into Tom's classroom during a lecture, and, while Tom's students film him on their phones, he threatens to kill Tom if he ever so much as talks to Olive again. The video goes viral, and everyone knows it's about Olive — her relationship with Adam has been the talk of the department for months. (It's unclear how realist this movie's universe is meant to be, but it was hard to avoid the thought that Olive was probably immediately doxxed.) Olive confronts Adam, furious that he'd broken her trust like this.

And, uh, then they kiss and are in love and the movie's over??

I'm not sure if my reaction to this ending — straight-up anger — would have happened if I'd seen this movie, say, a month ago. But, like so many young American women, I've spent the last few weeks furious about the ongoing Cornell fraternity rape case. Conservatively, at least half of my friends in undergrad were sexually assaulted, harassed, or threatened by men who never faced consequences for their actions; I have acquaintances who were threatened with rape in the exact same way that Olive was in The Love Hypothesis. The idea that the solution to this endemic of sexual violence is, bluntly, to have a mean boyfriend who can yell at your abuser for you is just offensive. The only thing that can stop a bad misogynist professor with awful boundaries around grad students is not, in fact, a good misogynist professor with awful boundaries around grad students.

I hate being such a killjoy, especially around a movie based on a book that so many people love. And I really do believe romance fiction should be allowed to grapple with darker themes and concepts, including in ways that gloss over some amount of real-life messiness to keep the focus on the central couple. But if you're going to go down that path, I think it behooves you to be a bit more thoughtful than this. —Lily Osler

And now, a word from Peppermint Patty's Wikipedia page

Buy Emily's It's a Wonderful Life book!

Every Time a Bell Rings, the book about It's a Wonderful Life that I cowrote with Defector's Lauren Theisen, is out now! Less a making-of or a historical document, it's more an attempt to consider the film from a variety of angles, major character by major character. There are essays about World War II PTSD, whether Bedford Falls had any gays in it, and Donna Reed's impossible standard for womanhood. And it's an incredibly beautiful holiday gift, with a gold foil cover and festive seasonal endplates. Buy it today! —ESJ

Last week in Episodes...

• In last week's Monday Digest, Lily affirmed her identity by continuing to enjoy Silksong, while Emily questioned everything she's ever believed as she came to realize that she quite liked Digger.
• Emily tackled The Americans and the ways the TV landscape has changed in the last decade in this week's 26 Episodes:

When "the golden age of TV" – imagine a million qualifiers around that statement but go with me here – ended is an open question. Most critics and scholars will agree it began on January 10, 1999, when The Sopranos debuted and opened the floodgates for morally complex protagonists, simultaneously broadening the types of networks that had the budget to air original dramas. But the endpoint is harder to pin down. The one I've seen most frequently cited is May 17, 2015, when Mad Men ended its run, but allow me to suggest the actual end of this so-called golden age was May 30, 2018, when The Americans aired its series finale, "START."

• We introduced the next TV show we'll be recapping: A French Village!
• And new Episodes freelancer Carolyn Wang closed out the week with a fantastic essay on the humanity of John Wilson's The History of Concrete:

Texts without authors, images without subjects, and symbols without referents: Generative AI realizes a capitalist vision where artists are no longer necessary for the production of cultural work. Such technology clearly puts independent creators like Wilson at risk. These days, if you wanted to learn about the history of concrete, you wouldn’t have to watch a 101-minute documentary; you could ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or any large language model. But would ChatGPT’s history of concrete retain Wilson’s acute critique of late-stage capitalism? And would its narrative be so wondrous and strange? 

Want to read all of that great stuff? The only people who have access to all of it are our paid subscribers! Why not upgrade your subscription today? If you do, you can take part in Friday's upcoming mailbag!

Some pop culture things we're into

• For some reason, it's really weird to me that Rachel Bilson is playing Zach Braff's girlfriend on the Scrubs reboot. Like, yes, they had a flirtation in the 2006 film The Last Kiss, and they are of a similar age – Braff is a 1975 baby, and Bilson's an '81 – but there's something too similar about the energies between the two to me. As J.D. girlfriends on Scrubs go, Bilson's Charlie is pretty good – though I long for Mandy Moore's character from all those years ago – but I often find myself wondering how they're going to write her out, not because I want to see that happen but because I know it must. Short-term dating arcs on sitcoms maybe just get a little more depressing as we age? I don't know! –ESJ
• Dave Boyle's new ghost movie Never After Dark mostly nails its J-horror particulars, making it strong enough to play as homage while never quite getting out of that space. The movie's "let's do a J-horror" spirit extends to the fact that the movie switches horror subgenres around the midpoint, in a way that I'm still sort of wrapping my head around. But the core idea – a woman travels Japan helping scrub properties clean of ghosts with the help of her dead sister – is a nice riff on familiar tropes, and I especially liked how Boyle came up with some cool new ghostbusting methods I hadn't seen 10 million times before. And the movie's well worth seeing solely for Moeka Hoshi's lead performance, which requires her to hold the screen all on her own for a substantial part of the movie's runtime. She's pretty magnetic, made all the more so by how blasé she is about the supernatural bullshit she has to put up with. –ESJ
• There's not a lot there yet, so take this recommendation with a grain of salt, but I'm really vibing with the Steam version of Slow Roads, a game that involves driving through endless procedurally generated landscapes based on the California coast, England's hill country, and the moon (of course). It's nice to drop in for a half-hour or so every night before bed and just zone out with some music. The planned features for future versions are great, and I hope the game sells enough copies to realize this dream. –ESJ
• I've been a fan of Remi Wolf's for years, and (like many pop fans!) I'm convinced that she deserves a way bigger audience than she has. Will Mud, her new album, be the one that catapults her to superstardom? I'm not sure, but goddamn it, it really should be. If you're in a rush, "Twiggy" is one of my favorite tracks of the year, but, really, just listen to the whole thing. —LO
• Inspired by Carolyn's essay (it's so good! Give it a read!), I logged back into my long-dormant HBO Max account to give the pilot of How To with John Wilson a watch. I realize that I am six years late to saying this, but holy cow, what a show! Wilson is quietly masterful at balancing tones — he's able to segue from near-unwatchable cringe comedy into a devastating reminder of the importance of human connection without missing a beat. It's not a show that demands, or even encourages, a binge; still, I'm half-convinced that I'll have watched all three seasons by this time next week. —LO

Let's watch the first episode of Norman Lear's hyper-obscure gender role reversal soap-com All That Glitters, shall we?

Discuss

Should there be more hangout sitcoms about people in their 40s and 50s? (Whither Cougar Town!!) Or does the Scrubs reboot prove how unsettling this might feel? Talk about it in comments or the Discord!

Some good links

• Inside the Failed Fight to Unionize One Of Gaming's Most Idealized Studios [Kotaku]
• How Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life embodies the best of America [LitHub] [and Every Time a Bell Rings]
• In Georgia, two trans candidates believe voters are ready for them [The 19th]
• Digger ??? (with Dana Stevens) [Critical Darlings]

A Good Song

The free edition of Episodes is published every Monday and every other Wednesday. Premium subscribers get those newsletters, plus extra ones every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Our editor-in-chief is Emily St. James, and our managing editor is Lily Osler. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).