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Despite how immersed The Other Two is in the ups and downs of the pursuit of fame, essentially it’s a family story. The series—which aired on Comedy Central before switching to HBO Max for its second season, concluding next week—is about siblings Brooke (Helene Yorke), Cary (Drew Tarber), and Chase (Case Walker), their widowed mom Pat (Molly Shannon), and her new boyfriend Streeter (Ken Marino), who happens to be the architect of youngest brother Chase’s wildly successful pop music career.
Bringing family dynamics into the hyper-commercialized world of pop music and daytime television makes their bonds to each other stretch and strain. In season two, Brooke’s managing both her mom, a newly minted daytime star, and her brother, a singer who is in denial about his lack of talent. The professional demands she has to place on them—including, in one shameless incident, a financial debt Brooke needs to pay off—have undermined both Pat’s and Chase’s sanity. But as the show illustrates in background touches, if Brooke is an indifferent daughter and sister, she’s a pretty good manager. Pat’s minting money; Chase’s fans have pivoted to his fashion line; and in the penultimate episode of the season, Brooke takes on one of her favorite performers, Alessia Cara, as a new client.
Meanwhile, her brother Cary, a mostly out-of-work actor, spends most of the show discovering anew how humiliating it is to try to be discovered; time and again, the most successful gambit is hitching his wagon to his famous relatives. To be sure, it seems embarrassing to have your mother FaceTime you without warning from every single episode of her unexpectedly popular daytime show. But in the back half of season two, Pat’s boasts about Cary manage to get a project of his, Night Nurse, resurrected from production purgatory, which aligns him uncomfortably with nepotism over talent, again.
The Other Two made an impression on me in its first season with its cutting humor about media; in a TV landscape dominated by Ted Lasso’s aw-shucks warmth, The Other Two isn’t afraid to talk shit about the dysfunctional industry it’s a part of. But this season, I’ve felt drawn to the show for its thorny subtext about the way our personal and professional spheres are made to overlap, be it via a social media presence or a job literally managing your mother. The hours are long, the breaks are short, and one’s most intimate relationships are part of an endless grind. It turns the support of one’s siblings and parents into something that can be quantified in profits earned, which keeps everyone in couture, but doesn’t seem to make anyone involved feel closer to each other.
Some of the plotting in the back half of season two is a little predictable, but the finale brings everyone together for a big shouting match in a cathartic moment that has been a long time coming. The Other Two offers so many human foibles in this one scene: Brooke’s difficulty in considering the experience of other people, Cary’s fundamental need to prove his talent, Pat’s inability to ask for what she needs, Chase’s incredible naïveté, and the peculiar flavor of pathetic desperation that Ken Marino brings to Streeter. It’s such a smorgasbord of failing to connect to the people we love that there’s a little bit of something for everyone; for myself, it’s Yorke’s Brooke that gets me every time.
Which is to say, the main reason I like The Other Two is that it’s about failing. Not simply failure, which implies one incident that ends, but failing—the quality of being stuck in an endless slog, slowly succumbing to the mud. In the second season, that’s been embodied by the two main characters, Brooke and Cary, neither of whom have really “made it” but are so tantalized by their proximity to success that they’re still embarrassing themselves. There’s never enough recognition or self-respect to go around; there’s always some new hurdle to try to hurl themselves over.
And from our perspective, it’s not so clear why they’ve trapped themselves in this search for Hollywood’s validation. The world Brooke and Cary are so desperate to enter is full of awful people—narcissistic and controlling, overworked and underpaid, entitled and full of shit. No matter how clearly these two see the industry—and they’re well-positioned to see both the best and the worst aspects of it, as appendages to their famous family—the allure of being on top keeps them on the grind. But we don’t have to see it that way. By the end of the second season, The Other Two has halfway made a case for retiring early and moving to the beach.
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