Both of their sexual trysts are highly imperfect Andi and Kyle seem amused at the novelty of what they’re doing while they’re doing it. Both Andi and Kyle score on their first night out-Andi with a handsome charmer she meets at a bar before her date with someone less handsome and charming, Kyle with a co-worker from the theater where he rehearses. In season 2, they’ve decided to try an open marriage-or, rather, Andi has decided, and Kyle has decided to go along with it for Andi’s sake. One of the best episodes, “Open Marriage,” revisits a working mom, Andi (Elizabeth Reaser), and a stay-at-home Dad, Kyle (Michael Chernus), who, in the first season, were attempting to spice up their sex life. The tone Swanberg establishes, and the dramatic range to which he confines the show, have a leveling effect, particularly as it relates to Easy’s poignant portrayals of sexual and romantic relationships. (Full disclosure: I grew up and currently live in Chicago.) And the characters are decidedly Midwestern in their ambitions-to put on an amateur burlesque show, or brew a great coffee stout where Portlandia, perhaps one of Easy’s closest analogues, would ironize the quiet pursuits of its denizens, Swanberg’s Chicagoans undertake them with a real sincerity. Most of the episodes end, if not happily, then at least tenderly. That he contains the drama across all episodes within a particular register-catching a suburban package thief matters as much in Swanberg’s world as a 17-year-old girl who donates $50,000 to her church to make a point to her parents-amounts to a distinctive, Midwestern realism: the highs nor the low ever threaten to spin out of control. Swanberg, a veteran independent filmmaker, operates with a light touch other than some interesting perspective shifts, he mostly gets out of the way. The result, in Easy, is a series of tightly-plotted episodes that nonetheless feel loose. This is, in part, because of how Swanberg works-off a basic outline, versus a precisely worded script, which allows his actor ample room to breathe, or “play,” as they did in his most well-known films, Drinking Buddies and Digging for Fire. In this way, Easy seems, at times, less like a typical scripted TV show than an alternate Chicago-verse populated with characters Swanberg has wound up and let go. Some of the characters are new others were featured in season one others still are featured in episodes of which they are not the focus, as bit players. Even those who have interesting professions-the pro-slut blogger/escort in episode three, for example-are rendered ordinary. Not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps the best way to describe director Joe Swanberg’s Netflix series Easy-the brilliant second season of which dropped on last week-is that it is, in fact, “easy.” The series is a collection of eight half-hour vignettes, taking place in or around Chicago, with a special cast of deliciously un-special characters: the mildly successful graphic novelist the stand-up comic who drives Uber the local feminist art curator the middling stage actor.
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