Life and Beth (Hulu): TV Review
/LIFE AND BETH
10 EPISODE SERIES ON HULU STARRING AMY SCHUMER
My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT.
I like Amy Schumer…or at least I liked her 2013-2016 Comedy Central sketch comedy show Inside Amy Schumer, which was a clever knock-off version of Dave Chappelle’s Comedy Central show Chappelle’s Show, which ran from 2003-2006.
Unfortunately, since the initial success of Inside Amy Schumer, Schumer’s comedy has gone precipitously downhill and she has devolved into being little more than a parody of herself.
For example, in 2015 she wrote and starred in Trainwreck, which was directed by Judd Apatow, who was the big comedy director/producer of the time, which was meant to catapult her into the upper echelons of Hollywood and the public consciousness.
But a funny thing happened on the way to comedy stardom, or not-so-funny as the case may be…Trainwreck, ironically enough, was a trainwreck. Trainwreck was a distillation of all the worst things about Schumer but its most grievous sin was that it wasn’t even a little bit funny. To give an indication of how ill-suited Amy Schumer was for the big screen, former pro-wrestler John Cena comedically outshone her and was easily the funniest thing in the whole movie.
The climax of that film, where Amy dances seductively with cheerleaders in order to impress her boyfriend, is the cringiest of cringe for all the wrong reasons. What made Schumer interesting as a comedian was her bravado embrace of this heretofore somewhat anathema archetype of the party girl/disinterested slut. But Trainwreck reduced her to groveling to get the good guy, which obliterated the comedy archetype she had so masterfully embodied up to that point.
Since the failure of Trainwreck, Schumer has kicked around and done nothing of note except for some annoying tampon commercials.
But now in 2022…she’s back with her high-profile co-hosting job at the Oscars and Life and Beth, a series on Hulu.
To Schumer’s credit, of the three Oscar’s hosts this year she was the funniest, but that’s like being the tallest midget in the Lollipop Guild. This year’s Oscars will, of course, forever be remembered for Will Smith’s egregious slap, but I must admit that as I watched Life and Beth, I felt more and more empathetic with Will Smith as the urge to slap someone became overwhelming. I guess Amy Schumer just brings that out in people.
Life and Beth is one of those shows that you watch and don’t care about anyone in it, don’t care what happens and don’t want to keep watching but for some reason, usually mental/emotional/entertainment fatigue, you just keep watching it. It is a mind-numbingly narcissistic celebration of victimhood sad-sackery with nary a laugh to be found in the manure pile of endless ennui.
The show is ten episodes long, and each episode runs between 25 and 30 minutes, but they are the longest 25-30 minutes of your life. I pride myself on not checking to see how much time is left in movies or shows when I watch, but in a 25-minute Life and Beth episode I found myself checking three of four times how much was left to bear, and being shocked and dismayed at how much more I had to endure.
The story of the show is that Beth, played with a rote, dead-eyed indecisiveness by Amy Schumer, is a wine saleswoman in NYC in a dull and dour relationship with an absurd co-worker. Her relationships with her family are strained as she’s estranged from her father, her mother is a domineering nag and her sister avoids her.
Beth’s true narrative journey begins when her mother dies in a car accident and Beth is thrown into a storm of existential angst that leads her back to her Long Island childhood home (where she is haunted by poorly executed and casted flashbacks to her teen years) and falls for a local farmer, John (Michael Cena), who is somewhere on the autism spectrum…apparently the annoying part of it.
John is so repellent and Beth so repugnant, and Beth’s attraction to John is so lifeless, that their courtship is akin to watching two convicts assigned to the same prison cell try and figure out who gets the top bunk.
Beth’s character arc makes no sense and carries no dramatic weight because she doesn’t seem like a real person and none of her relationships, be it with her mother, sister, best friends, father or boyfriend, seem remotely authentic or genuine.
Comedians, like all damaged people, have a tendency to conflate and confuse pity with love. Schumer is no different, as she wants us to pity Beth thinking that means we love her. The problem is that Beth is so dull that she generates neither pity nor love. The only pity I felt was for myself for thinking I had to keep watching this banal drivel.
Life and Beth is one of those shows that seems to be more interested in being diverse and inclusive than it is in being funny or interesting. The show boasts a plethora of minority characters, including Murray Hill as Murray, Beth’s transgender boss, but the diversity feels painfully forced. But to be fair, the manufactured feel of the inclusivity could be a function and extension of the show being comedically anemic and devoid of humor.
The one thing I did find amusing throughout the show was a piece of purely unintentional comedy hiding in plain sight, namely, whoever dressed Amy Schumer had a wonderful sense of humor, but I’m afraid Amy wasn’t in on the joke. Nearly every outfit Beth wears, is a God-awful embarrassment, unflattering to the extreme, that accentuates the very worst of her features.
Schumer’s wardrobe is so atrocious that it reminded of an acting coaching client I once had, a very accomplished actress and truly beautiful woman, who scored a prominent guest spot on a highly popular tv show. On the show, they dressed her in what may be the ugliest sweater in the history of clothing. This puffy, fuzzy sweater with a giant triangle attached on one shoulder, was a crime against humanity, an absolute abomination, so much so that my client’s manager refused to use her terrific performance on her reel because the aggressive ugliness of the sweater overpowered her acting and would repulse casting directors. Nearly everything Amy Schumer wears in Life and Beth is the equivalent of that sweater.
Amy Schumer’s wardrobe aside, Life and Beth is not funny…at all. If you wanted to check it out just to see if there’s a laugh or two, don’t waste your time because, trust me, there isn’t.
If you’re looking for laughs go into the vault and watch Inside Amy Schumer, and remember a time when she was bawdy, ballsy and brash and best of all…funny. It seems like such a long, long time ago.
©2022