If 28-year-old Samantha Fink, a writer in New York forced to move back home, weren’t in so much denial, she’d pray for the serenity to become merely a train wreck. In the first episode of the new dramedy “Single Drunk Female,” Sam (Sofia Black-D’Elia) nearly blinds her boss, destroys two cars and ends up in jail, “covered in, like, 50 kinds of urine.” When she lands a job as a grocery-store cashier, her put-upon mother, Carol (Ally Sheedy), congratulates her a little too honestly: “I’m proud of you. Definitely did not think you could do it.”
Instantly charming and dense with talent, “Single Drunk Female” nonetheless presents at first as an ungainly misfit: a show about an almost-30 alcoholic on the teen-aimed Freeform network. But, it turns out, sobriety shares some commonalities with puberty. For the newly dry Sam, there are a lot of firsts: first sober dance, first sober hookup, first sober writing session. Committing to the 12 steps also means figuring out how to socialize beyond the bar and re-evaluating which friendships have the potential to transform from sozzled camaraderie into something else. It’s not exactly a second adolescence, but we do watch Sam, who’d Godzilla’d the pillars of her adulthood, build back her life, brick by humiliating brick.
Refreshingly free of didacticism, the hilarious half-hour series was created by Simone Finch, who based her protagonist’s sobriety journey on her own experience. “Single Drunk Female” puts characters first, relationships second and issues a distant third; this isn’t just a story about quitting alcohol, but about cynical, rules-avoidant, darkly funny Sam quitting alcohol. (She’s especially distrustful of Alcoholics Anonymous, which she calls “the cult.”)
Finch’s creative team, which includes Jenni Konner (“Girls”) and Leslye Headland (“Russian Doll”) – chroniclers of dyspeptic millennial womanhood – are loath to waste a moment of screen time. The writing is good enough that the show evokes something of the simultaneous insularity and cosmopolitanism of its Boston setting despite being mostly filmed in Atlanta. And, at least for this viewer, its spot-on satire of the media industry – so rare in pop culture – along with its savvy sendups of pop feminism contribute to its aura of earned authority.
In one of her many moments of self-deprecation, Sam refers to her living situation with her mom as “Grey Gardens on acid.” The reality is far from true, but Sam’s relationship with Carol forms the wounded heart of “Single Drunk Female,” a mother-daughter bond that’s necessarily shifted after Sam’s sobriety, but in ways neither woman wants to fully contend with. Fearing her mom’s judgment, Sam reverts to a petulant adolescence. Eager to lose herself in a new romance, Carol’s exasperated that she has to actively parent again. Channeling Parker Posey’s manic melancholia, Sheedy is pitch-perfect as a caring but passive-aggressive mother and widow whose lapses in supporting her daughter feel relatably flawed.
Black-D’Elia is more naturalistic as Sam, who can’t afford to move out or keep her social life as the way it was. Potentially on the chopping block is her happy-go-lucky drinking buddy Felicia (Lily Mae Harrington), who Sam has trouble seeing as anything but. Sam is also forced to view her childhood BFF Brit (Sasha Compère) in a new light after breaking off their friendship years ago when Brit took up with Sam’s ex-boyfriend (Charlie Hall). Then there are Sam’s new allies in recovery. Her love interest, James (Garrick Bernard), and his own struggles with alcohol abuse are the focus of the season’s lovely and exceptional eighth episode, a woeful take on “Before Sunrise.” Punctuating the proceedings with a wry mordancy are the scenes with Sam’s hyper-efficient, overachieving sponsor Olivia (Rebecca Henderson) and her aggrieved wife Stephanie (Madeline Wise), who’s understandably resentful of the many alcoholics darkening their door at all hours of the day and night, clamoring for Olivia’s attention.
“Single Drunk Female” skips along at a brisk rate, its 10 episodes covering the first year after Sam’s flameout in New York. The galloping pace of the storytelling does skirt some of the uglier facets of alcoholism and the day-to-day difficulties of living with temptation and dependency. But it’s hard to complain when so many shows today drag out their plots to save the juicy bits for a second season that may never come. Like its protagonist, “Single Drunk Female” is impatient to get to the thick of things. It’s up to the viewer to keep up.
“Single Drunk Female” (30 minutes) is available for streaming on Freeform and Hulu with new episodes airing 10 p.m. on Thursdays.
Jack (Rick Glassman), Violet (Sue Ann Pien) and Harrison (Albert Rutecki) live in an apartment and are looked after by their aide Mandy (Sosie Bacon) in “As We See It.” Amazon Prime Video
A delayed coming of age is also the subject of “As We See It,” the latest drama from “Friday Night Lights” showrunner and “Parenthood” creator Jason Katims. In the latter series, Katims’s own autistic son served as an inspiration for the character of Max Braverman, a child, then teen, on the spectrum played by Max Burkholder. But the fictional Max, like so many autistic characters on television, was marked on the show by his youth and his singularity among his neurotypical family.
By any metric, this new half-hour drama is a major leap forward in autism representation. It features three characters on the spectrum with varying needs, personalities, backgrounds and developmental stages – though all are in their mid-20s – and, most notably, the trio are played by neurodiverse actors. (Two actors with autism also co-star in neurotypical roles.) Katims populated his writers room and crew with neurodiverse talent as well, seemingly to prove a point. In a recent interview, he noted the “80% unemployment rate for college graduates on the autistic spectrum” and concluded, “That’s not right.”
Based on the Israeli series “On the Spectrum,” the Amazon drama finds Jack (Rick Glassman), Harrison (Albert Rutecki) and Violet (Sue Ann Pien) living in an apartment and looked after by their aide Mandy (Sosie Bacon).
Like “Single Drunk Female,” “As We See It” is immediately grabby, the show’s “lessons” far less apparent than its dedication to fleshing out its characters. It opens with one of the many short-term goals the roommates are asked to fulfill as a condition for staying in the apartment: walking down their block in the Los Angeles suburbs to the local cafe. This task isn’t for Jack, who works as a coder, or Violet, who’s employed at Arby’s – though both of their jobs become imperiled at some point in the eight-part debut season. But for Harrison, leaving the building and confronting all manner of ordinary yet unexpected stimuli are big challenges.
Since Jack and Violet have lives beyond the apartment, their story lines are unrelated to, if inevitably impacted by, their condition. Jack loses his job after lashing out at his boss, which would be cause for concern on its own, but magnifies in consequence when it’s revealed that his elderly father Lou (Joe Mantegna) has been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. Violet desperately wants to find a boyfriend and get married, but her older brother Van (Chris Pang) doesn’t want to let her on dating apps, lest a skeezy suitor take advantage of her disability.
Harrison, meanwhile, is forced to grapple with his social isolation. He, too, harbors physical desires, but what he really wants is a friend. (True to life, the roommates get along well enough, but aren’t exactly pals.) Harrison hits it off with his 10-year-old neighbor, but the discomfort that other adults feel about a boy hanging around an unrelated adult man leads to obstacles in their burgeoning friendship. As the season progresses, Harrison’s loneliness and sense of unwantedness grow increasingly unbearable.
“As We See It” devotes the other half of its runtime to the difficulties of caring for adults with autism, and the guilt they feel when they’re forced to move on. Mandy sees her aide gig as temporary – a stopgap while applying to med schools – and as much as she cares for her charges, she wonders if pursuing caretaking as a career means failing to reach her full potential. Lou scrambles to find a way to ensure Jack is cared for after he’s gone. Orphaned Van, not yet 30, is used to being let down by people who find Violet to be too much, making him reluctant to introduce his sister, who takes up almost all his time, to his girlfriend (Vella Lovell).
For a show with such a heavy emphasis on the details (and exhaustion) of looking after autistic adults – best represented by Lou and Van’s struggles to find the necessary balance between protecting their loved ones and exposing them to the uglier sides of the world – there are a few serious missed opportunities. Some indication, for instance, as to the frequency of the arrangement that serves as the show’s premise would’ve been useful, as would a hint toward how people who can’t afford a second household might accommodate their grown family members on the spectrum. (In the pilot, the ever-blunt Jack observes that, without the extravagant subsidization of the apartment and Mandy’s services by Harrison’s wealthy parents, their quasi-independent lifestyle wouldn’t be financially feasible.) And while “As We See It” is far from the only show to suggest that the pandemic never happened or has run its course, it feels like an unfortunate gloss not to explore the greater burdens that COVID placed on both autistic people and their caretakers.
Overall, “As We See It” is sensitive, moving and reliably funny, if a tad too reliant on comic relief involving Jack and Violet’s lack of tact. The performances are seamless across the board, with Pien, playing a character nearly two decades her junior, particularly standing out as the emotionally volatile Violet. There are missteps here and there, especially in romantically pairing actors with little chemistry. But between “Single Drunk Female” and “As We See It,” television continues its ongoing experiment in telling the kinds of stories the medium has never seen before, and it’s only getting better at it.
“As We See It” (30 minutes) is available on Amazon. (Disclosure: Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.)
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