The past 15 years have been a golden age of television, amassing generational treasures out of Cold War-era Russian spies posing as an American nuclear family (The Americans), a Black family fighting for their family legacy by protecting their land (Queen's Sugar), a talking horse that swears (BoJack Horseman), and a surreal journey through the mecca of Black cool (Atlantic). But, somewhere along the path of TV fame, humor went from absurdism that anyone can laugh at to a funny vehicle that was too intellectual to make drama more palatable. We stopped laughing out loud, and started laughing in our heads.
That's why we need more shows like Peacock's self-contained comedy Lay.
For eight 30-minute episodes, Ruby Yao (Stephanie Hsu) and her true-crime best friend AJ (Zosia Mamet) track down everyone Ruby slept with after discovering that her all sexual partners die in the order when they are. she had sex with her. Searching for a way to stop the murders, the stunning Hsu tries to escape the curse by dry cramming over her jeans, recalling her covid-era safe-sex romp she had and Search Partyand John Early tries to talk dirty through an N95 mask, and tells her old crush with Simu Liu that they could die soon.
Lay it doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it moves over any drama, flattening it into nothing more than soil from which humor springs. Ruby is taken to task by all her ex-boyfriends over her reckless actions, including drunkenly sleeping with AJ's boyfriend and lying about it, and self-inflicted any in-depth study she could quickly engage in while making fun of her situation. . She yells at an incompetent police officer about what a horrible person she is, then tells him that she didn't intellectually check to see if his partner had a wedding ring because she immediately saw he was gay . Lay is a laugh factory with a joke manufacturing strategy I wish other “comedies” would follow.
We live in a world where drama is full of anxiety like The beara deep oral dive into the psyche of a hitman like Barryand an exploration of grief through the eyes of a children's TV host as Joking all can be nominated for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes. All three shows are amazing, but there aren't many laughs. Post-Breaking bad, Hollywood has gone overboard with the relatable antihero trope, to the point where it has found its way into almost every genre of TV. Why can't we just have a goof ball going through absurd situations in which the only real goal is to find new ways to make the audience laugh?
Fortunately, we have such shows Hacks, Abbot Primary Schooland, of course, Lay, making sure we remember that even well-fed people can be stupid all the time.
