Bittersweet Dysfunction in Casual

In Casual on Hulu, created by Zander Lehmann with an assist from Academy

Award-nominated director Jason Reitman, adult siblings are perpetually looking for love and yet sabotaging their relationships to avoid intimacy. The closer they get, the more likely they are to bolt. In a TV landscape dotted with half-hour shows about horrible people whose snarky contempt for the world we’re supposed to find amusing, Casual pulls a magic trick. With each episode, creator/showrunner Zander Lehmann peels back a layer of narcissistic siblings

Valerie (Michaela Watkins) and Alex (Tommy Dewey). Slowly over the first season we come to empathize with the sadness Valerie and Alex feel as a result of their forced isolation. When we meet their parents, Dawn (Frances Conroy) and

Charles (Fred Melamed) who led a free-loving, “swinging” lifestyle when the children were young, we understand Valerie and Alex’s hesitation at being too open and vulnerable.

We both empathize and sympathize with them, and it’s poignant and funny. We understand that divorced Valerie and playboy Alex were raised by raging narcissists themselves. And Valerie’s teenaged daughter, Laura (Tammy Lynne

Barr) is also being raised by an oblivious selfish mom who happens to be a

!1 psychotherapist. (Doctor, heal thyself.) We align, then judge and cringe at their actions, pull back, then reconnect. Rinse, repeat. Just as Valerie, Alex and Laura are fickle, so is the audience’s allegiance to them—which continues to shift, in roundelay fashion, from episode to episode. The sweet spot of the series is how despite their intolerance and solipsism that tend to drive others away, when the chips are down, they’re always there for each other.

Valerie and Alex take after some of their parents’ hedonistic ways, but as we see in Season 1, Episode 8, entitled “Bottles,” some of it has scarred them deeply.

The shame and rage these two siblings feel toward their parents is palpable in this scene, making the viewer complicit in this Thanksgiving attack.

[The family sits around the table for Thanksgiving dinner.]

CHARLES Although I must say, I have a very clear, specific memory of Alex’s bottle.

DAWN Oh, yes, that was a bizarre phase.

ALEX Can we please talk about something else?

CHARLES When Alex was a kid, he used to take these empty soda bottles, and he’d put them all around his room, and then during the night, instead of taking the

2 ten steps or so that he’d have to go to the bathroom, he’d pee into these soda bottles. And then in the morning, he’d sneak into the bathroom, he’d empty them, and then he’d put the bottles back where they were. Now, this went on month after month after month. And, finally, one day I asked him what it was about. And you know what he did? He broke out into these outrageous tears, and he said, “These are my night bottles. My night bottles.“ I don’t know what this was about. It was like the neurons in his brain got tangled up or something and never quite went back right. We believed for a while he was gonna need a full-time nurse.

[LATER]

[Alex explains the “bottles“ to Emmy, who he’s dating.]

ALEX He gets so much joy out of telling that story. I used to try to explain, but--

EMMY Explain what?

ALEX Never mind.

EMMY Is there more to it?

ALEX Forget it.

EMMY Okay.

ALEX Okay. As soon as the sun would go down, they’d unlock the doors, and people would come in, go out, new faces every night. And I’d wake up to go to the

3 bathroom, and there’d be some naked woman in the hall or two strangers fucking on the couch. After a while, I just couldn’t do it, you know? So I waited for the sun to come up and the people to leave.

In a subsequent episode, the siblings assist their terminally ill father with his suicide. It begins with a funny scene that shows Valerie and Alex lamenting about how tedious it is for them to empty out all the lethal capsules (to make their dad’s fatal cocktail) and ends with his demise and his kids and granddaughter left feeling numb and inadequate to deal with the void. It’s heartfelt, tragic and walks the line between casual irreverence and grief over a man they loved, but never liked or respected. Like everything in Casual, it’s messy and complicated, and the aftermath of this scene begs the question: Now what?

Episode Cited

“Bottles,” Casual, written by Zander Lehmann and Harris Danow; Lionsgate Television/Hulu.

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