Mr Corman: Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s personal TV show about thirty-something anxieties

Best known as an actor in projects including 10 Things I Hate About You and Inception, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s new series is deeply personal.

It may be billed as a comedy but Mr Corman isn’t very funny.

A deeply personal project from actor, filmmaker and musician Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the 10-episode Apple TV+ series straddles the line between drollness and ruminative drama, and is playfully experimental.

Gordon-Levitt created the series and directed and wrote many of the episodes, in addition to playing the central character, a schoolteacher who loves his job but is still wondering how his life turned out so differently.

The series is an exploration of our entitlement to an ideal life, and the let-down when the particular thing we wanted – a dream career, a perfect romance – isn’t in the offering. Are we unlucky or did we not deserve it?

Mr Corman was created by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

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Josh (Gordon-Levitt) loves teaching 10-year-olds, and he’s great at it too. But that wasn’t the plan. Josh was supposed to be a musician, and he and his fiancee Megan (Juno Temple) were meant to be headlining their own shows.

But the band didn’t work out and Megan’s gone, and Josh is living in a modest rented apartment with his childhood friend Victor (Arturo Castro). He’s nearing 40 and suffering from anxiety attacks. He’s also hallucinating his estranged father in the street.

Josh thinks he’s been unlucky, but he also feels the burden that his life isn’t as bad as other people, so is he even allowed to complain?

Mr Corman explores the anxieties of thirty-somethings.

There’s a universal resonance to Josh’s dilemma, especially for thirty-somethings who were promised the world and then the world failed to deliver – it’s that question again, what does the world even owe you or did you not work hard enough for it?

With so-called life milestones (house, marriage, kids) now pushed back later and later, Mr Corman captures the anxieties of the late coming-of-age that crashes straight into an early midlife crisis.

Through scenarios such as sibling rivalry, modern dating and social media fame, Gordon-Levitt and his writing team crafts incisive stories that work episodically and as a whole.

It’s also a series that plays around with form.

Mr Corman experiments with form from episode to episode.

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So, you get episodes that are more traditional narrative structures, but you’ll also get an entire episode that’s a two-hander between Gordon-Levitt and Hugo Weaving, in which most of the instalment is the latter in a series of mini monologues that is another reminder of just how commanding Weaving is when you give him really great writing.

There’s an episode that shifts the focus to Victor, another episode that runs through fantasy “what if” scenarios of how Josh’s life could’ve gone, another with a musical interlude and one that primarily takes place as a pandemic-era zoom date.

Mr Corman’s experiments with how to tell its story keeps it fresh, while guest stars including Weaving, Temple, Debra Winger, Jamie Chung and Lucy Lawless reinforces the show’s calibre.

It’s an ambitious, stealthy series that doesn’t spoon feed its audience.

Mr Corman is on Apple TV+ now

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