Netflix’s Friends From College is a bad show about worse people

You know that group of friends who are so impressed with themselves that their inside jokes spawn inside jokes of their own, making it impossible for anyone else to penetrate their bubble of self-perpetuating delusion? Well, how would you like to spend an entire TV series with them? And before you answer, please bear in mind that in this scenario, the group of friends in question met at Harvard, and will be sure to remind you of that fact on a near-constant basis.

Welcome to Friends From College, Netflix’s newest comedy and a near-total misfire.

There’s a lot to be frustrated about with this show, which comes from co-creators (and married couple) Nicholas Stoller (Neighbors) and Francesca Delbanco. It stars the charismatic likes of Keegan-Michael Key and Cobie Smulders as two of the friends who met in college, and now, 20 years later, they and the rest of their friends are all in New York City figuring out their upper-middle-class shit together. The show’s talent bench is deep, but watching frustrated author Ethan (Key), frustrated lawyer Lisa (Smulders), frustrated designer Sam (Annie Parisse), frustrated artist Marianne (Jae Suh Park), frustrated literary agent Max (Fred Savage), and frustrated trust fund kid Nick (Nat Faxon) mess up through the series’ eight episodes is far more taxing than it is entertaining.

In the end, the most damning reason Friends From College fails is also the simplest: It’s not nearly as much fun to spend time with these characters as either they or their creators think. Sometimes the show realizes this, and is marginally better for it. But most of the time, watching Friends From College just means watching unpleasant people do unpleasant things for no reason other than the sake of doing them.

Comedies have always picked apart the neuroses of people behaving badly. But the great ones either find a way to own the bad behavior in question (Seinfeld) or dig into why those people do the things they do (FXX’s You’re the Worst). Friends From College does neither, instead letting its characters stumble along in selfish pursuit of whatever they want, without ever expressing an interest in what their motivations are or who they might be as people.

One of the best examples of this problem is the ongoing affair between Ethan and Sam. Both are married to other people, but they’ve been drawn to each other and sleeping together on and off for years, ever since they first fell for each other as 19-year-olds in a Harvard dorm. Ethan and Sam know they’re being deceptive and awful to their spouses — especially since Ethan is married to Lisa (Smulders), a younger friend from college — but that doesn’t stop them from tearing each other’s clothes off in hotel rooms and creating excuses to get “the friend group” together in order to see each other.

But it’s not the simple fact of their affair that makes Ethan and Sam hard to root for; it’s the fact that they make no sense.

Half the time, Ethan is completely devoted to Lisa and her quest to have a baby — though he seems indifferent about parenthood — through thick and thin and painful IVF cycles. The other half of the time, he’s begging Sam to make more time for him and brushing off concerns that he might, y’know, be treating his wife like shit. A more nuanced show could’ve probably find a way to make this conflict interesting, but Friends From College thinks that just throwing characters into messy situations is enough.

The problem with this approach is fairly straightforward: Two-dimensional characters trying to deal with three-dimensional situations is never going to be interesting, no matter how much they try to tell you otherwise.

The most depressing thing about Friends From College is that it managed to snag a stacked roster of actors who, given better material and more specific direction, could have made something special. Key throws his whole self into portraying Ethan, no matter how nonsensical the character’s actions tend to be; Parisse can be truly ferocious when she digs into Sam’s brittle rage. Smulders is a particular standout, giving Lisa real depth and vulnerability, even when the script forgets that she’s a living, breathing person (which is most of the time). And as Max’s long-suffering boyfriend Felix, comedian Billy Eichner provides a much-needed dose of exasperation in the face of his partner’s hyperactive collegiate past coming to roost during their date nights.

But as it stands, Friends From College is mostly limited to indulging its characters’ worst traits without offering any nuanced commentary to speak of. Worse, it can’t make up its mind on whether or not it has enough self-awareness to acknowledge that its characters are terrible humans, so everything ends up feeling random rather than logically motivated — and again, almost everything every character does on this show is entirely selfish, whether they know it or not.

Whenever they’re not busy being self-absorbed, the Friends From College spin their wheels in gorgeous lofts, at black-tie events, and on wine-tasting party buses — always without any indication that they’re learning a damn thing or growing at all. So when Felix finally snaps halfway through the season and tells Max how pathetic it is that Max’s entire college group is stuck in arrested development, it’s not exactly the bruising moment of truth the show wants it to be. However, the scene still has value, because it’s just such a relief to know that someone else sees the Friends From College for what they really are.

Friends From College is now available to stream on Netflix.