Review of ‘the other two’: hilarious pop culture second-men

Perhaps because comedy is still considered less important and necessary than drama (tremendous mistake), fabulosa ‘sitcom’ ‘The other two’ It has taken almost three years to be released in Spain; in the United States, its renewal for a third season was announced in September.

And that the series had an important pedigree: we are talking about a creation of Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, head scriptwriters ‘Saturday night live’ between 2016 and 2017 and part of the teams of ‘Broad City’, in Kelly’s case, and ‘Master of none’, in the case of Schneider. After leaving ‘SNL’, but still sponsored by his former boss Lorne Michaels, they designed this irresistible satire of modern pop culture and the increasingly rapid and hysterical cycles of fame, that concept completely redesigned by the Internet.

Helene Yorke and Drew Tarver they embody Brooke and Cary, two millennial brothers (yes, they are millennial, they looked at it on Google) with a present very different from the one they once dreamed of. She was a professional dancer as a teenager, but now she awkwardly moves through life and sleeps on floors that she should only teach. He works as a waiter (and flashmob dancer!) While waiting in vain for his Big Opportunity as an actor. Although somewhat unfortunate at work, in love & mldr; they are still worse. Cary is in love with his roommate, who lets himself be loved from time to time, but claims to be fully and purely straight. Ha

His life will take a sharp turn when his brother Chase (Case Walker), 13, becomes a pop star overnight thanks to a helicopter mother (Molly Shannon), but above all, the vagaries of virality. . It is not clear if so much fame is deserved: his video (‘I want to marry you at recess’) brings flashbacks of the ineffable case ‘Friday’ of Rebecca Black. With just one song ChaseDreams (that’s his inspiring alias) will find musical representative in the sibylline Streeter (Ken Marino), who rhymes with Scooter, that is, Scooter Braun, the controversial ex-manager of Taylor Swift. While Brooke and Cary are attached to the success of their brother, cameos of the most diverse celebrities follow each other, tearful parodies that make you cry with laughter (that moment ‘Call me by your name’) or constant allusions to reality shows in the style of ‘Rich women from Beverly Hills. ‘

“The other two” is effective as a sitcom, but it is even more enjoyable if you play the game of winks proposed by Kelly and Schneider. The series is a clear consequence of an obsessive relationship of love and hate, perhaps above all love, with the pop culture of our time, accelerated, complicated and intrinsically linked to the ethical zeitgeist. When more frenetic and surreal can remember the mockumentary ‘Popstar’, another creation of some comedians linked to ‘Saturday night live’: The Lonely Island. When the idea seems rather to explore the strange loneliness of living at the top, or a few miles below it, like Brooke and Cary, you can almost sense that the creators have read ‘Jonny Valentine’s love song’, the perfect novel about a Justin Bieber look-alike that Teddy Wayne published nearly a decade ago.

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Now we need to know if Comedy Central will decide to chain the end of the first season with the premiere of the second and if by the arrival of the third we will quickly have the episodes in our inbox. Because, outside the United States, something like ‘The other two’ cannot be allowed to remain in the background, like its great leading partner.