The buddy comedy is a tried-and-tested genre, with countless hilarious examples of what happens when you bring two contrasting personalities together.
Usually, though, the main characters in these buddy comedies are of the same gender – predominantly men – and rarely is a male-female friendship played on for laughs.
In Platonic, a new Apple TV+ series starring Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, the traditions of the genre are flipped on their head as the show sees its comedic stars explore a calamitous friendship.
Platonic follows Will and Sylvia, played by Rogen and Byrne, who are former best friends who reconnect after a long time apart.
They’re both approaching mid-life, with individual experiences of what that means, and the reignition of their friendship has a seismic impact in both of their lives in a hilarious way.
“I know a lot of people who are in similar places in their lives,” laughs Rogen, 41, of his character, Will, who’s recently divorced and running a brewery.
“Honestly, I’ve always been a big Husbands And Wives fan, the movie, and it kind of remind me of Sydney Pollack’s character in Husbands And Wives a little bit – obviously that’s like, the decades ago version of this, of a similar arc, but it’s something to me that always stuck in my head as this divorced guy who’s kind of floundering, and grasping to his youth and thinking he’s rediscovering this dormant part of himself.
“But to everyone outside of him it feels, like, very tragic and sad, not beautiful at all and like a car wreck in slow motion.
“So yeah, to me that was really funny, and the character I’d never really played before. It’s something I just thought that, yeah, would be entertaining.”
“She reminds me of so many of my friends who’ve like been in the trenches of like, little kids, and raising little kids, and being the primary caretaker and then coming out, and having once been in the workforce and trying to get back in, and just feeling like, also floundering and also like, disoriented, and feeling useless, and ‘what do I do now? What’s the next chapter for me, after like the intensity of small children…’,” says Byrne, 43, of Sylvia.
“And she, at that time, coincides back with this old friend of hers, and they have this very intense friendship, and then her kind of going off the rails and then needing to be reined in and go: ‘What are you doing?’ And all of her insecurities and shame around that, of her behaviour, just hiding, you know, her own sort of mid-life crisis.”
Platonic speaks of how, often, as we age we might tend to lose many of our friends of the opposite sex, as things like marriages and families take up more of our time. Beyond the gags, it’s an interesting look at the dynamic of male-female friendships, and an ode to how much of a tonic they can be.
“I think our show, it speaks to the fact that men and women can be friends, and should be friends,” says Rogen.
“Their gender really kind of falls away from being their main issue very fast, and it’s really their personalities and where they’re at in life that is like the main conflict they have.”
“And it is nice to see,” adds Byrne, who worked alongside Rogen in 2014 film Neighbors (or Bad Neighbours, as it was titled outside of the US) and is also known for 2011’s Bridesmaids and 2015’s Spy.
“It’s essentially like a buddy comedy between the two of them, and you rarely see that with a man and a woman – it’s always usually the same gender.
“I like those movies, I know Seth does, and so we felt like it was an opportunity to do that, knowing we’d already kind of had that with the Neighbors films, and felt like we were confident going in that we could make it funny.”
Historically, we might have seen this kind of story told through a 90-minute, gag-filled film, but as Byrne points out, with streaming series being so popular now, “we had this opportunity to do it in the long form, which is exciting”.
“I haven’t really seen a show like this, in terms of like, an honest, hard comedy, going-for-the-laughs genre on TV,” adds the Australian actress.
Working with the longer form of the series was “fun”, The Fabelmans’ and Pineapple Express’s Rogen agrees.
“I think that’s what’s exciting is that TV is now inviting tones and styles that were not that welcome on it (before).
“There has been R rated comedy on television for a long time but it’s been pretty, like, moody, and I think the idea of R rated comedy that is more overtly speaking to the type and tone of theatrical comedy that we were making, for decades, which is not moody and is more uproarious, and joyous, and fun, and relatable, and very grounded in the lives of the average, quote unquote, viewer watching the show a little bit more – and so that, to us, was really an exciting opportunity.”
For a series like this to be successful, of course its stars have to have excellent on-screen chemistry. For Rogen and Byrne, who clearly also get on off-set too, this seems simple – though as Rogen points out, “you don’t have to like someone to have good chemistry with them”.
“You can hate them!” he laughs.
“Or you can like them and have bad chemistry. But I think it’s nice that we both like each other and have good on-screen chemistry.”
“It’s one of the reasons we keep working together,” he adds.
“I also think we appreciate that it is that we are a male-female comedy duo that works well in different dynamics, and I think that’s something that is rare, and when you think it works and it’s fun, it’s an easy choice to keep wanting to do it.”
“And this show really lived and died on that,” agrees Byrne.
“We couldn’t have done it – I mean, it just wouldn’t have been very good!”
Platonic launches on Apple TV+ on Wednesday May 24.
