Summary
More Charlie and Stewart improves Platonic Season 2 a bit, but Will continues to grate in Episode 5, and the subplots feel predictable.
Here’s a bold prediction about Platonic Season 2 — I reckon Will is going to lose his job, and Sylvia’s event planning business isn’t going to take off. Now, both of those could quite easily be wrong, but I’d be willing to bet a conservative amount of money that they’re not, since you can generally see this show’s storytelling coming a mile away. Episode 5, “Jeopardy”, feels slightly improved thanks to the increased presence of Charlie and Stewart, but I was constantly reminded that Will and Sylvia are the least interesting aspect of the show, and the show’s about them and their relationship, so they keep showing up.
Sylvia, I can tolerate, at least. But Will remains insufferable to me, and if I have to see Seth Rogan in another pair of those high-waisted shorts, I’m liable to claw my own eyes out. Further cementing his arrested development bona fides, the hook of “Jeopardy” is that, after breaking up with Jenna at the altar, he’s now staying with Sylvia and Charlie as an annoying house guest. It’s just as well that both of them have things going on in their personal lives, since if they were all trapped in the house together, they’d probably kill him.
Charlie’s problem is that his much-anticipated appearance on Jeopardy! goes disastrously, and he can’t get over the embarrassment of it. He won’t stop thinking and talking about it, and then resolves to somehow prevent the episode from being aired on television, first with a legal injunction and then, even more ill-advisedly, through breaking and entering. Will’s involved in that last bit, but admittedly reluctantly. When Will is the voice of reason in a scenario, you know you’ve messed up.
Sylvia’s problem is that she has agreed to plan the annual party for Charlie’s firm, but when Stewart informs her that the event is going to be much larger than first anticipated, she immediately panics and tries to quit. But since she doesn’t want to let Charlie or herself down, she instead perseveres and, as is her way, radically overpromises, forcing her to pose as a working girl — the world’s oldest profession, don’t you know — to try and secure an exclusive venue that ends up backfiring totally. It still isn’t entirely clear by the end of Platonic Season 2, Episode 5, whether she has managed to pull it off. I suspect not.
And, finally, Will’s problem is of his own making. Since Jenna wasn’t just his bride-to-be but also his boss, it turns out his decision to jilt her has some unintended consequences for his career, which start with his company card being cancelled and quickly progress into outright torture in an effort to force him into quitting. To this end, a guest-starring Kyle Mooney, playing Will’s Jenna-appointed replacement, deliberately drives him up the wall with a string of decisions designed solely to enrage him. It’s a bit tough to swallow that Will just assumed his career would be unaffected by breaking his boss’s heart, but that’s probably the kind of thing he’d think, to be fair.
If nothing else, the split focus in “Jeopardy” works to its advantage, and I somehow prefer Will when he’s trying to bond with Charlie. There are some funny lines here, especially everything Stewart says, but all I keep coming back to is how uninvested I am in Will’s career and Sylvia’s entrepreneurship, two drains that the show keeps endlessly circling. More attention paid to supporting characters is no bad thing, but it’s a distraction from the core issue that the central dynamic probably ran out of road in Season 1, and unless the remaining episodes — five of them! — take some significant, unexpected swerves, it’s unlikely that the show’s fortunes will change any time soon.
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