Amy Schumer's Hulu comedy Life & Beth has the curious quality of being at once a little awkward and exactly what it wants to be

Los Angeles Times

Life & Beth's "parts don’t all tonally mesh — it is an amalgam of romantic comedy, straight drama, bits and sketches and adapted stand-up, with the odd line that seems to come more from Schumer than her character — and at times it feels constructed to deliver a point, a project as much as a story," says Robert Lloyd of the comedy created by and starring Schumer. "But it is also clearly sincere and personal, salted (like Schumer’s script for Trainwreck) with autobiographical details." He adds: "The series is also a love letter to Schumer’s husband, Chris Fischer, a chef and sometime organic farmer (and her co-star on Food Network’s Amy Schumer Learns to Cook), here molded into the person of (Michael) Cera’s John. (There is great authority in the series’ discussions of produce.) It’s frequently very funny, full of bright comic turns, and often quite moving, even beautiful, sometimes just for the space of a shot, in a way that might make you reconsider a character. It’s sentimental in the end, but that is what sometimes happens when artists grow happy in their life."

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• Life & Beth is like a prestige comedy version of a Hallmark movie: "It’s a tale as old as time. Woman moves to the big city and pursues a semi-successful career she only sort of likes," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "Woman dates guy who looks good but is not good to her. Spurred by a family emergency, woman returns home, expecting to hate it. Woman reconnects with her roots, with her real self, and with the meaning of Christmas. Okay, it’s not always Christmas, but that’s the context in which this particular arc is most familiar: romance novels, Hallmark originals, movies in which a woman in high heels steps in the muddy fields of authenticity and falls headfirst into the hesitant but conveniently located arms of the guy who will actually be right for her. That arc is familiar for a reason: When done well, it can be very satisfying. This is part of what’s so fascinating about Life & Beth, the new Hulu series created by and starring Amy Schumer. TV has made dozens of projects that prestige-ify crime-based genre fiction, and Life & Beth is essentially that, except instead of jumping from the popularity of police procedurals into a show like The Wire, it’s a boutique comedy translation of the You Can’t Go Home Again (Or Can You?) subgenre of romance stories."
• Unlike the best shows that took up Inside Amy Schumer’s mantle, such as Fleabag and Hacks, Life & Beth suffers from a lack of purpose: "That’s not to say it sets its stakes too low. Some of the best series on TV are slice-of-life programs about women navigating middle age, from Better Things to Work in Progress to Somebody Somewhere (starring Schumer’s friend Bridget Everett)," says Judy Berman. "What’s missing, here, is a unifying sensibility. The inconsistencies are glaring. Life & Beth’s tone lurches from realistic to absurd and back; relatively normal characters suddenly devolve into off-the-wall caricatures. Flashbacks framed as life-altering ordeals often read as normal teen baggage—a particular problem at a time when TV is saturated with parallel timelines and trauma plots. The pieces just don’t add up to a satisfying whole."
• Life & Beth is enjoyable to watch, but it's quite uneven: "Beth's story starts a tad slowly and its many tones never quite mesh," says John Powers. "I kept thinking Schumer is trying to weave together two different strands of groundbreaking women's television. One is the strand that includes Fleabag and Somebody, Somewhere, whose heroines grapple with the past in order to move into the future. The other is found in Girls and Better Things, which are looser in form, and built less around a clear, overarching narrative than around capturing privileged moments and scenes that often don't add up to anything bigger — and don't need to."
• Life & Beth's tone is all over the map and it can seem to be trying to much, but it ultimately works: "Despite telling a relatively small story, Life & Beth can at times feel guilty of trying to do too much, as if Schumer and her collaborators (including Inside Amy Schumer director Ryan McFaul) want to showcase everything she’s still capable of since she was last in the spotlight, as well as demonstrate new skills she’s picked up along the way," says Alan Sepinwall. "Not all of those things work seamlessly with one another, and some of them don’t work at all. But Life & Beth is an interesting and ultimately sweet and likable tale, and a solid soft-relaunch of sorts for Schumer herself." He adds: "Tonally, the show can be all over the map. The first couple of episodes are almost oppressively dark in how they put you inside Beth’s head to appreciate her utter ennui. It’s not really until the third episode that the actual shape of the season comes into focus, including the arrival of Michael Cera as John, the plain-spoken farmer who handles the produce at a local winery. And it’s not until the fourth (directed by Schumer and written by fellow Inside Amy Schumer vet Tami Sagher) that all the show’s elements — not just the comedy and the drama, but Beth’s present-day story versus flashbacks to an adolescent Beth (Violet Young) in the Nineties — start to really click. Yet even after that episode, the style can fluctuate wildly: buttoned-down and slightly whimsical art-house drama one minute; broad, sketch-style comedy the next. But if the pieces often seem mismatched, they tend to be strong individually."
• Life & Beth is a surprise and total triumph: "The 10-episode, half-hour series is funny, sure, but it's also achingly sad, dealing with family trauma as easily as it makes jokes about getting high on mushrooms or poorly timed broken condoms," says Kelly Lawler. "There is a depth here that until now has been present only in Schumer's greatest sketches, a layered, thematic and semi-autobiographical story that is some of the actress, writer and director's very best work."
• Life & Beth is messily personal: "The half-hour dramedy sets out to chart Beth’s changing relationships with her friends, family, romance, health and career over past and present," says Angie Han. "It’s a tall order for ten half-hour episodes, and the series’ reach somewhat exceeds its grasp. It’s neither as hilarious nor as moving as it seems like it could be, and the tonal shifts between 'dram' and 'edy' can be jarring. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing for the rawness that Schumer — who not only stars but created the series and wrote and directed most of its episodes inspired by her own experiences — brings to the table. At its best, as in an episode that draws parallels between Beth’s love life and her bittersweet history with her dad (Michael Rapaport), the series feels as personal as a therapy session."
• Life & Beth is not a triumphant return to the spotlight, but it has touches of the old Schumer -- smart and transgressive and self-aware: "They’re stretched out a little too thinly over the 10 half-hour episodes, and they don’t really compensate for the overall sentimentality and simplistic psychology. But for the true fan, they’ll be worth the relatively short binge," says Mike Hale, adding: "Schumer takes the genre in her own direction, though, by welding together its usual narrative — the melancholy story of self-discovery — and her preferred mode in films, the bawdy, ugly duckling romantic comedy."
• Life & Beth is a chance for Schumer to make a Louie-style comeback: "The model he established with Louie in 2010 remains a viable one: a self-led sitcom in the vein of Seinfeld, but with the auteurist approach of a more ambitious era of TV," says Alison Herman. "Successors like Ramy, Master of None, and Broad City turned Louie’s example into a flexible template. Each show shared some common components—a creator-star from the world of comedy, playing a character directly adjacent to their own persona—while leaving room for each one’s specific sensibility. As Schumer’s entry into the field, Life & Beth is more than her return to the spotlight. It’s a look at how she wants to present herself to the world after a few major developments: marriage, motherhood, and the same calamities we’ve all lived through in the past half-decade. Before her semi-hiatus, Schumer wasn’t just flagging in her film work. Her stand-up, too, felt increasingly stale, with specials like The Leather Special simply reiterating the lewd, self-deprecating stage presence she’d built over the years. Life & Beth is a chance to push Schumer’s work to a new place, and one she tries in earnest to take."
• Life & Beth proves that Schumer still has more to say: "Early adolescence is on-trend with Pen15 leaning into the stomach-churning awkwardness of being 13, Big Mouth’s frank discussion of puberty, and even Pixar exploring this avenue with the recent Turning Red," says Emma Fraser. "But the power of Life & Beth exists in the juxtaposition of these two defining ages. Young Beth isn’t boxed in yet, despite battling traumatic and formative personal demons—her obsessive-compulsive hair pulling is another candid, devastating arc. And as the older version barrels toward 40 it is clear that something has to change. It is this tension that leads to a major life decision, a romantic shift, and a meet-cute on a local vineyard, which seems to be informed by Schumer’s marriage to chef Chris Fischer."
• Life & Beth is a mixed bag but has a watchable first season: "It's a commendably heartfelt passion project from Schumer that introduces enough lovable characters to be engaging, even if it has not quite figured out what to do with half of them quite yet," says Ciara Wardlow, pointing out similarities between it and Schumer collaborator Bridget Everett's Somebody Somewhere.
• Life & Beth is an ambitious look at adapting in adulthood: "It would be reductive to call it a coming-of-age story pegged to the delayed timeline of modern life, or even a story about going home again," says Amanda Whiting. "Yes, it hits some of those familiar notes: long neglected friendships re-blossom not unlike you’ll find in a Hallmark movie, she dates the wrong guy — a very funny Jonathan Groff as a small-town personal trainer mesmerized by Beth’s glitzy life in 'The City' — on the way to dating the right one. But Life & Beth, at its best, represents an alternative to those genres, suggesting a rich and complicated vision of what it means to be a grown-up. To live is to be constantly revising, acknowledging that preferences and priorities shift, sometimes so slowly and subtly that our own unhappiness can surprise us. You can come of age and then get lost again; you can go home only to realize that some things are better left in the past."
• Life & Beth is exciting and a little frustrating: "Narratively, the push and pull between showing Beth as she’s nearing 40 (in a fish-out-of-water bit, she and her friends get drinks at a club full of much younger folks that has a bright lit-up sign that says 'F*ck.') and as a child experiencing real trauma doesn’t quite find the right rhythm," says Tim Lowery. "Watching it unfold, you wish Schumer either decided to focus more on the budding romance with the weird and weirdly likable John—it’s a charmingly offbeat relationship—or cut the series down to, say, seven episodes, like HBO’s recent coming-back-home comedy Somebody Somewhere."
• Amy Schumer recalls pushing back against studio expectations: “I think actually, I was being like, sort of getting studio or network notes, like I think they were kind of trying to edge me toward that. They kind of wanted some questioning of that,” she says. “And I was just like, ‘No, I feel like she’s moving forward,’ you know?”