Seth Rogen Stars in A Great Show for AppleTV+. It’s Called ‘Platonic’

Warning: Contains spoilers from Season One of Platonic.

Seth Rogen has brought us so much that selecting the single best production he’s been involved with is probably impossible. He’s produced The Boys, Black Monday and Blockers. He’s acted in Long Shot, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Freaks & Geeks. He’s hosted The Great Canadian Pottery Throw Down AND, in whatever spare time he has left over, created his own pottery. At the moment, he’s being feted for The Studio — and rightly so, given the 23 Emmy nominations it racked up for its freshman season. I liked The Studio and don’t begrudge it the accolades it’s receiving. But this time next year, we better be seeing the same kind of attention for Rogen’s other AppleTV+ sitcom: The Studio is good, but Platonic is better.

Platonic, which premiered in 2023 and then lay fallow for a year, is about Will (Rogen) and Sylvia (Rose Byrne), the titular platonic friends. They became very close friends in college and remained so for some time afterward. But when Will and Audrey (Alisha Wainwright) were on their way to marriage, Sylvia told Will she didn’t think they were a good match. Will married Audrey anyway, and he and Sylvia stopped speaking. When we meet Will and Sylvia in the series premiere, Sylvia’s just seen on social media that Will and Audrey have split, and decides to try reaching out to Will. Coffee leads to an invitation to Will’s brewery, Lucky Penny; that leads to a trip to a diner, a scuffle in a pawn shop, a passionate airing of their grievances against each other and then a renewal of their friendship. When Will needs someone to help him break into Audrey’s house and steal back his bearded lizard, he calls Sylvia; when Sylvia damages a partner’s oil portrait at her new job and needs to get it fixed in a hurry, she calls Will. 

Season Two, which kicks off with two episodes on August 6th, starts to pay off the reveal of the Season One finale: Will’s engagement to Jenna (Rachel Rosenbloom). A food chemist at a corporation that runs high-concept chain restaurants, Jenna is promoted to CEO after her predecessor, Johnny Rev (Ted McGinley), is accused of sexual misconduct. In the second season, Will has moved into her stunning oceanside mansion and has hired Sylvia to plan his wedding. Sylvia pushes back on Will’s attempts to keep her and Jenna apart, then regrets it as Jenna reveals her true personality. Can Sylvia be a good friend to Will without ruining the friendship in the process? Again?

What’s most satisfying about Platonic is that it knows what it’s not: the bad version of this premise is always lurking in the background, providing contrast against the good version we got. It’s clear to the viewer that there’s no sexual spark between Will and Sylvia, but their friendship is so close that other characters will be discomfited by it and question what, if not fucking each other, they actually are doing together all the time. Sylvia’s husband Charlie (Luke Macfarlane), who came into Sylvia’s life after Will, is mostly generous about Sylvia’s relationship with Will, despite the mess they bring out in each other; when Charlie gets jealous, it’s of their closeness, and her tendency to have fun with Will instead of Charlie. (After Charlie walks in on Sylvia bleaching Will’s hair, Charlie impulsively decides he wants to try it too, regretting it as soon as he has to take his new frosted tips to work at his law firm.) 

Jenna may not exactly suspect that Will and Sylvia are having an affair, but she can tell he’s getting something from Sylvia he doesn’t even bother seeking from Jenna. Sometimes that’s fine with her, since she seems more than capable of remaking Will into the person she wants him to be, probably starting when he left Lucky Penny in the first season and started working at Johnny 66’s faux craft brewery concept. Over dinner at a wedding reception in the Season One finale, Sylvia makes small talk with Jenna, asking how she got into food chemistry. “Well, I studied chemistry,” says Jenna, then stops. In Season Two, we get to see exactly how well this exchange represents Jenna’s character: an absolute dud who can temporarily conceal her dullness with vivacious extroversion, but who is ultimately the kind of person who quotes the Barbie movie unironically and wants a horse-drawn carriage at her wedding. 

Rosenbloom never cheats Jenna’s cheuginess, making her a glorious nightmare in Lilly Pulitzer separates. None of us would have imagined the Will of Season One dating a woman who loves to go golfing with her dad, never mind getting engaged to her, but Rosenbloom makes us believe Jenna got them there by hitting hundreds of tiny pressure points on Will, so gradually and methodically that he could convince himself it was his choice to end up exactly where she wanted him to.

The tension between what Will actually wants and what he thinks he should settle for goes to the heart of what the show is about. As an adult, how much of your life can permissibly be pure fun, and how much is just enduring it? Will tries to get Sylvia to affirm his misery based on what he’s observed from the outside of her marriage, while she insists that she’s happy and fulfilled and that she and Charlie couldn’t be more solid. But Season Two also gives us more insight into how things look from Charlie’s perspective. Being Sylvia’s “rock,” as she repeatedly calls him, means he’s under pressure to be the family’s unshakeable support while her event-planning “business” struggles. The fallout from Charlie’s appearance on his favorite game show changes the dynamic in the household in a way both Charlie and Sylvia’s characters really needed.

But: this is also a show about Will and Sylvia being ungovernable maniacs whose individual capacity for chaos grows exponentially when they’re together. When the champagne gets contaminated at the season-premiere engagement party, neither of them is to blame, but their solution gets more and more complicated as their panic increases, and ends with them trying to whip up a Veuve Clicquot substitute from ingredients in the country club kitchen. Later in the season, Will is confident he can get Sylvia to an appointment by cutting from dead-stop Los Angeles traffic down an alley near Lucky Penny, with results that are entirely predictable to everyone but these two fools. I thought I knew the meaning of the word “cursed” until I saw Will, Sylvia and Sylvia’s school mom friend Katie (Carla Gallo, fortunately getting much more to do in Season Two) take a kayak trip down the filthy L.A. River. 

Some of the Season Two beats feel like echoes of plots we saw in Season One, but maybe that’s just true to life: It’s not like self-destruction takes an entirely different form every time. I also wish we got to see more of Will’s old Lucky Penny colleagues: Andy (Tre Hale), Omar (Vinny Thomas) and Reggie (Andrew Lopez, actually showing us he knows how to be funny since that’s certainly not something they let him do on The Bear). But Season Two is an absolute delight that co-creators Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller can be proud of — much prouder than the fictionalized Stoller should be of The Kool-Aid Movie he’s saddled with in The Studio. 

Platonic is The Other Two, but less mean; Fleischman Is In Trouble, but less despondent. It deserves to break out in Season Two. Help it get there.