Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen crack each other up in mid-life farce Platonic

Platonic ★★★★
Apple TV+ from Wednesday, May 24

Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen bring combustible humour and giddy camaraderie to Platonic.Credit: Paul Sarkis

Among Hollywood movie stars, comic chemistry is even scarcer than romantic heat: two headliners who can make us believe their characters genuinely crack each other up is a rarity. So, take a bow Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen, because this duo has an effortless rapport of combustible humour and giddy camaraderie. Their shared hilarity is a pocket universe we get to peek in on, first in the 2014 comedy feature Bad Neighbours and its 2016 sequel, and now in this seditious mid-life crisis farce.

In the two movies the pair played young parents, but here they’re former best friends – Byrne’s Sylvia and Rogen’s Will – who fell out five years prior, when she told him not to marry his girlfriend. Will did, and now that he’s painfully divorced Sylvia offers consolation while quietly grabbing some welcome distraction. Will, a boisterous beermaker, may be struggling, but Sylvia isn’t much better. After 13 years raising three children, she’s suddenly directionless. Day drinking looks like fun again.

Created by husband-and-wife team Francesca Delbanco and Nick Stoller, with the latter also directing as he did with Bad Neighbours, Platonic is smart enough to invoke and then avoid the When Harry Met Sally maxim that men and women can’t truly be friends. Sylvia and Will are buddies without the distraction of attraction – she used to be his “wing-lass” in college bars. The issue is that their friendship is all-consuming. Even Sylvia’s steadfast husband, lawyer Charlie (Luke Macfarlane), starts to feel excluded.

With its Los Angeles sunshine and half-hour episodes, the show breezily sidesteps into intriguing terrain, whether it’s Will and his hipster status facing up to commercial success or Sylvia dipping a toe back into the workplace. But front and centre is the comic double act of Byrne and Rogen. They talk trash, make hideous misjudgements, and share appalled reaction shots. The two wind each other up and you can believe that their characters offer both support and a step backwards to each other.

Rogen reaches heights of outrage, especially when Will sights his ex-wife’s new Scandinavian boyfriend, but he often defers to Byrne, who is a terrific comedienne, setting up Sylvia for set-pieces that Stoller rarely allows to run too long. Platonic is economical and exacting, allowing just enough bittersweet acceptance into the process of besties gently forcing each other to get on with their 40-something lives. Sylvia and Will need a push, but the audience gets easily pulled in.

Slip ★★★½
Binge

Slip is low-key science-fiction and a showcase for writer, director and star Zoe Lister-Jones.Credit: Binge

For several years now, superhero blockbusters have been banging on about the multiverse, the endless parallel universes running alongside our own that house different versions of the same souls. Exhibit A? Marvel’s middling Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But only a few titles have found genuine stakes in multiple possibilities. Academy Awards winner Everything Everywhere All at Once did it, and so does this knotty, deadpan black comedy.

A showcase for writer, director and star Zoe Lister-Jones, this New York-set series starts with museum curator and underwhelmed wife Mae Cannon rebounding from an argument with her husband, Elijah (Whitmer Thomas), by sleeping with a musician, Eric (Amar Chadha -Patel). But when Mae awakes the next morning she’s in a timeline where she’s married to Eric, he’s a superstar, and she’s living in frighteningly different circumstances.

Slip is low-key science-fiction – few digital effects, numerous telling characters. It has echoes of Netflix’s Russian Doll, but instead of repeating the same day Mae keeps falling from one strand of her life to another. With her sex life as a catalyst, the show digs into the needs and uncertainties that propel its protagonist. In just seven episodes this multiverse of sadness starts wild and gets intimate.

Air
Amazon Prime

Ben Affleck, trying almost too hard to seduce the viewer, plays Nike boss Phil Knight.Credit: Amazon Prime

An express arrival on streaming six weeks after it debuted in cinemas, Ben Affleck’s biographical sports drama is about the corporate hustle that brought future basketball icon Michael Jordan to a struggling Nike in 1984. It’s a very American story – fame and immense wealth were the outcomes – told with a light touch and a smart focus: Jordan himself is barely seen, with Nike scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) desperately trying to woo the player’s mother, Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis). Affleck directs with crowd-pleasing expertise and steals his every scene as a preening CEO.

The Family Stallone
Paramount+

Jennifer Stallone, left, Sistine, Sylvester, Sophia and Scarlet attend the premiere of the Paramount+ series The Family Stallone.Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Sylvester Stallone is having a successful run in Tyler Sheridan’s Tulsa King and he has a former model wife and three adult daughters at home in Los Angeles – you do the reality TV sums. While it starts with the 76-year-old on set in Oklahoma City, the focus is family bonds and the gentle trials of Rocky helping raise girls when he kept disappearing to movie sets for months at a time. Stallone is a weathered anchor for all these innocuous interactions. Bonus points for declaring “I’m going full Rambo” when he receives unexpected news.

The Muppets Mayhem
Disney+

It’s nostalgia all round in this Muppets spin-off.Credit: Disney+

A Muppets spin-off that gets by on our collective nostalgia for the original show’s house band, Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, this good-hearted PG comedy has the six-piece happily on an endless tour when a novice record company exec, Nora Singh (Lilly Singh), hits them up to deliver the debut album they signed to do in the 1970s. The humour is pretty mild – they’re very cheerful stoners – but Janice is still cool as, and Animal is the perfect punctuation for any scene. A send-up of the Beatles’ Get Back documentary adds wry laughs.

Queer Eye (season 7)
Netflix

Ray Walker and Karamo Brown in a scene from season 7 of Queer Eye.Credit: Iliana Panich-Linsman/Netflix

Still operating out of New Orleans, the second generation of television’s gay Fab Five continue to pursue a makeover reality series as a means of confronting America’s jagged excesses. The show’s faith in mutual understanding and support for tolerance is as strong as ever, with this season’s subjects including a young paraplegic, a trans powerlifter who needs confidence outside of the gym, and a former soldier hoping to scrub up romantically. With relationship expert Karamo Brown leading the way, the show offers de facto therapy and an acknowledgment of trauma. It remains the most cheerful of balancing acts.

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