The Other Two packs more jokes per minute in Season 2

Paste Magazine

"The amount of jokes in just the first 30 seconds of the season premiere—even in just onscreen text—is an instant reminder of just how dense and astute of a comedy machine The Other Two is," says LaToya Ferguson of the Sarah Schneider and Chris Kelly's HBO Max comedy. "As the series exists in such a realistic, relatable, and recognizable world, all of those comedic moments where it’s just slightly askew continue to hit hard, especially when it comes to the celebrity culture in which these characters find themselves in. Whether it’s a joke about Blake Lively’s new restaurant or Jesse Metcalfe’s very existence or people who may or may not be Mayim Bialik, The Other Two’s second season is a comedy that understands and loves pop culture—both the very good and the very bad. (The Bieber/ChaseDreams comparison grows stronger this season, as it eventually introduces a Hillsong-esque church.) Kind of in the way 30 Rock ultimately proved itself to be a 'documentary' of working at NBC, The Other Two is that way when it comes to being immersed in pop culture, especially Very Online pop culture."

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• Season 2 is even better than Season 1: "The scripts are sharper and more focused — I’ve seen six of the 10 new episodes — and there’s more of Molly Shannon as their mother, which is a good thing," says Matthew Gilbert. "There’s also more character development, as we go further into the individual struggles of Brooke and Cary. Oh, the pair still moan about their own careers, snarking together with tons of super specific pop references not unlike Julie and Billy of Difficult People. But we see even more of their individual efforts to break through, as Brooke scrolls through TikTok looking for teen clients and Cary — who now has a too-committed boyfriend — decides he must learn to write vehicles for himself. We also see them begin to grow, but shhh; that word is out of place in the context of the show’s spiky wit."
• The two-and-a-half-year layoff and the move to HBO Max haven’t led to creative stagnation, nor have they opened the door for a creative leap: "Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider’s series still isn’t a show aimed at a wide audience, but it’s a show with an uncanny laser focus on its core demo," says Daniel Fienberg, adding: "Given the show’s popularity within a certain audience, it’s vaguely astounding how much less cameo-driven the second season is. Sure, they get The Bachelor gadfly Derek Peth (who I had to look up to make sure he was a real person) and Gossip Girl co-star Tavi Gevinson (in a generic part that seems to have been written for “semi-famous person we could get on short notice”) and a few others, but after the first season, in which nearly every episode contained appearances by various well-known media personalities or Kelly and Schneider’s former SNL colleagues, this constitutes either restraint or else a COVID-induced limitation. I’d interpret it as a point of maturation. The same might be true of a move away from the show’s initial insistence on running its best jokes into the ground through repetition or over-explanation. The show is still aggressive in its run of hit-and-miss dialogue, but I’d say there’s more confidence that if one line or gag falls flat (or even works), it’s OK to just move on to the next one. It can still be exhausting, as in an episode in which Cary and Jess go apple-picking, which instigates a run of HGTV/Instagay jokes that start funny but never escalate in a way that really works. More frequently, the show just finds its audience-pandering target — everything from the thankless life of a Hollywood manager to the less-than-glamorous life of a TV recapper to the name-checking of various Hadids — and fires willy-nilly before moving on to the next one. There’s also some maturation in the characters; the show’s longevity depends on character-driven humor, not just winking references to the disposability of streaming television or catty references to Riverdale."
• For one of the funniest shows on TV, The Other Two hasn’t been afraid of tragedy: "One overarching storyline through the show’s first season found a family trying to reckon with the loss of one of their own," says Steve Greene. "Sure, it all played against a 13-year-old’s rise from viral YouTube sensation to globally famous teen pop icon, but it was always there. Siblings Brooke (Heléne Yorke) and Cary (Drew Tarver) were constantly figuring out how to tell their newly minted celebrity brother Chase Dreams (Case Walker) the truth about their dad’s death. They agonized over how to keep their mom Pat (Molly Shannon) from accidentally making the situation worse, despite her best intentions. Now as the show approaches Season 2 — streaming as an HBO Max Original after the first season originally debuted on Comedy Central — it’s still an aspect of their family the Dubeks don’t exactly relish talking about. But with Chase off to college and leaving his music career behind, all of that bottled up anxiety has slowly worked its way into other forms, lingering in all the ways the show knows well how to capitalize on. The biggest change that The Other Two makes is flipping the season’s most prominent famous Dubek. Pat now finds herself as the host of a daytime talk show with her own name on it, connecting with a legion of enthusiastic fans who seem to share all her interests. When Brooke tells one particularly eager audience member, 'She loves you and she’s just like you,' she intends it as dismissive way of pacifying someone. As the season goes on, it becomes true in ways Brooke doesn’t always recognize."
• The Other Two is on track to become the funniest show of 2021: "The first season captured an essential facet of the early 2020s millennial condition: a failure to launch into adulthood while conceding youth to a new generation," says Inkoo Kang. "Preceding all those Gen Z memes and TikToks about the tragic unhipness of skinny jeans and Harry Potter fandom, that pitch-perfect first season was a prescient distillation of millennial anxieties about their waning cultural relevance. And it didn’t hurt that Kelly and Schneider’s unsparingly sharp, surgically precise satire of the excesses and peculiarities of showbiz made it one of the funniest shows of that year. After a 29-month hiatus, The Other Two returns Thursday on HBO Max and is on track to become the funniest show of 2021, too. (Its only real competition so far is Girls5eva, another entertainment-industry comedy about age-related insecurities.)"
• The Other Two brilliantly skewers Gen Z culture without insulting the members of Gen Z: "It’s an absurdist comedy — it has some serious 30 Rock vibes — but once we get to know them, there’s a surprising amount of warmth to the characters," says Dustin Rowles. "They know they’re all cliches but are trying to break out of their molds. Brooke and Cary are hesitant, at first, to capitalize on their little brother’s fleeting fame, but eventually acknowledge that there are many paths to success and this one is as good as any other. Brooke starts out as Chase’s personal assistant and finds that she’s surprisingly competent, while Cary uses his brother’s connections — and the fame he gains for being the 'gay brother' — to open doors to better acting opportunities. It’s mostly about the comedy, however, and The Other Two brilliantly skewers Gen Z culture without insulting the members of Gen Z — it’s a mockery of Gen Z at the expense of millennials, and it’s funny but not mean-spirited. The culture is ridiculous, but at least the Gen Z’ers are assured and know how to navigate it, while the struggling millennials can’t even figure out who they want to be. The siblings remind me a lot of David and Alexis Rose — they’re funny caricatures, but the more we get to know them, the more we become smitten. Molly Shannon, likewise, is terrific as the mom, who we think is one of those nightmare parents of child stars, but who we learn is really just going through a difficult time after the loss of her husband."
• As an entertainment-industry satire with a smartly trained eye for absurdity and a high joke-per-minute ratio, The Other Two is on par with 30 Rock
• This is a show by entertainment obsessives for entertainment obsessives
• In Season 2, The Other Two doesn’t just lambast celebrity culture
• Drew Tarver and Heléne Yorke talk getting cast and relating to their characters: "I saw myself in them. Being in your late 20s, early 30s, watching other people surpass you, it’s really disorienting," says Yorke of their characters. "It gives you this hunger and this thirst that is all-encompassing. That’s what happens to Brooke and Cary. That’s what you watch them go through. I remember riding the subway and looking at people on commutes to real jobs, being like, they have health insurance and a full collection of pots and pans. That was so beyond me."
• Heléne Yorke on the move to HBO Max potentially bringing in a bigger audience: "I think expectations are the death of career and happiness," she says. "So I’m trying not to psych myself up too much. You know, I’ve seen nine of the 10 episodes. I think it’s really good. I hope other people think it’s really good. And I hope that a bunch of people watch it. Of course, we’ve seen bumps happen to shows, in particular, things like Schitt’s Creek got a huge bump by being on Netflix and now Manifest, I think, is coming back because they’re on Netflix now. So that’s definitely out there. But there are certain times in my life where I thought, 'Oh wow, this is it, I’ve done it, I’m going to win an Oscar or whatever.' And, you know, things don’t always go the way you necessarily plan them to. Side note: That’s a massive theme of Season 2, that things don’t go according to plan. But, yeah, I hope so. I hope you’re right. That would be incredible. Chris and Sarah are geniuses. They worked really hard on the season, it’s like they poured gasoline on it this year and lit it on fire. So if more people watch because it’s streaming on this great new streaming service that I watch everything on now, that would be great. I’m like oscillating between The Great Pottery Throw Down and White Lotus. I love HBO Max."
• Sarah Schneider says she and Chris Kelly wanted to challenge themselves in Season 2, but admits "it sucks to be challenged": “(It was) kind of like, ‘Let’s challenge ourselves’ and then we were like, ‘It sucks to be challenged,’" Schneider says with a laugh. “Because when we started on this season, we were like, ‘Now we have to figure out all the things that we set up at the end of last season.’ I didn’t really think about how they would be executed!” Schneider adds: "We wanted to see where our characters could go and how they could grow and put new obstacles in their path and change their status quo and see what new challenges come from that. So we as writers and creators weren’t repeating the same dynamics. We’re eager to take them somewhere so we can experience it with them.” As Kelly points out, for all their outrageous behavior and misguided choices, Brooke and Cary are often the smartest people in the room. “They may do really stupid thing, but they’re smart people," he says. "And for them not to recognize that they’re just doing the same episode over and over again, that would be frustrating to watch.”
• Filming on Season 2 was interrupted by the beginning of the pandemic: "Yeah. We were about four episodes-ish into the second season," says Schneider. "The actual day we got shut down we were shooting in Central Park, comically shooting in the middle of the most people ever. We were shooting a music video with Pat that we have later in the season, and in between these big music video setups with dancers and Molly Shannon singing, we’d be like, 'Ok, this isn’t looking good. We think we’re gonna shutdown for two weeks.' And then we were down for a year. We made a little announcement that day being like, Thanks so much. We’re just going to shut down for two weeks. We’ll reach out to you guys in a couple of Fridays. Enjoy these two weeks off!' (laughs) Such little babies, we had no idea what was coming." Kelly says of starting production back up again: "Everyone was very excited to have work to go to, and we were very excited to finish it. But it also was very weird to be like, 'Wait, what is this show and what did we do (already)?' We had shot scenes where they, like, walk into a restaurant and then a scene in a restaurant, but we still had to shoot the scene where they walk out. It was literally like, 'Okay, they’re all one year older. What did their hair look like?'" Schneider adds: "Because we had shot pieces of it, we felt that we couldn’t really change a lot within the scripts. So we had to have a lot of talks on how to accomplish our show, which happens at a lot of events and on a large scale. So much of the reason the show works and why you believe the legitimacy of Pat and Chase is that they are at that level. The idea of having a big event where there are ten extras spread out was not in the cards. So it was having some logistical conversations about how to accomplish the scale of our show within the new confines of how to do it safely. It was definitely a new world."
• Schneider and Kelly didn't make major changes to the script after HBO Max announcement: “Sometimes we used to go through and check out how many curse words there were,” said Schnieder. “We’d be like, ‘We have 20 bleeps in the episode, that makes us look crass!’ Now we don’t have to do that anymore. It’s just out there, which is lovely. Sometimes there’s no better word than ‘f*ck,’ so what are you gonna do?”
• Season 2 exists in a "beautiful pre-COVID world": "We feel like our show is so 'of the moment'—it feels topical, and we’re commenting on pop culture—so we actually talked a lot about whether or not we needed to make changes, to reflect our completely changed landscape," Schneider says of making changes after the pandemic delay." But we decided to keep the scripts as they were. So then it was sort of nice for us to be able to shoot this show that’s sort of living in a world before, or like it’s running parallel." Kelly adds: "The season is so serialized and we were shooting so out of order, so it wasn’t even possible. I mean, the train already left the station. We were shooting scenes from the finale when we got shut down. It just exists in a beautiful world pre-COVID, or without COVID."