If Loot gets any nicer, it’s going to go full Ted Lasso [Apple TV+ recap]

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Loot recap: A gala turns into a team-building affair this week.★★☆☆
A gala turns into a team-building affair this week.
Photo: Apple TV+

The Loot crew dons black tie and tails for a humanitarian gala this week. Billionaire divorcee Molly is being honored, hit on and insulted all at once. Arthur is starstruck. Howard is in crisis. And Nicholas is just happy to be in a tuxedo surrounded by rich people again.

The Apple TV+ comedy swings hard for big moments of personal empowerment through kindness and self-respect. That’s all well and good, but I came to this show for something a little more caustic.

Loot recap: ‘The Philanthropic Humanitarian Awards’

Season 1, episode 6: In this week’s episode, entitled “The Philanthropic Humanitarian Awards,” Molly Wells (played by Maya Rudolph) has given surprise donations in the thousands to grassroots charity and outreach organizations all over Los Angeles. The resulting attention garners her an award from the Philanthropic Humanitarian Awards, aka The Manis.

Everyone from Molly’s charitable foundation gets to go to the black-tie event. That’s great news for everybody, especially Molly’s longtime assistant and only friend from her days as a wealthy party girl, Nicholas (Joel Kim Booster). He hasn’t gotten to enjoy any of the finer things in life ever since Molly took up humanitarianism instead of being a drunken, jet-setting, human tabloid scandal.

Molly’s just happy she’s being recognized for something that she has built on her own instead of something her ex-husband John (Adam Scott) made for her. She started taking a larger party in her organization partly as a means of getting out from under John’s shadow, and so to be feted for it means a lot to her; so it sure would be a shame if something took away the sheen of prestige from the event for her…

Everybody loves a black-tie party

Sofia (MJ Rodriguez), Rhonda (Meagan Fay), Ainsley (Stephanie Styles), Arthur (Nat Faxon) and Howard (Ron Funches) are not used to this kind of excitement, and they dig into the fancy food and champagne with glee.

Arthur spots a millionaire computer mogul who revolutionized digital accounting software and suddenly becomes starstruck. Howard, undaunted by his wealth, takes Arthur to meet his hero, and they hit it off. However, Howard realizes, in speaking to a successful older man, that he’s 38 and hasn’t done anything with his life. Arthur now has to talk him down from his crisis.

Meanwhile, Arthur’s not the only one who’s thunderstruck. Sofia notices that the guest bartender is vodka heir and philanthropist Jean-Pierre Voland. (Jean-Pierre is played by Olivier Martinez, who at 56 is making me feel ancient. Martinez to me will always be the sweater-clad dynamo who leads Diane Lane astray in the 2002 film Unfaithful.)

… but running into an ex has its down side

Molly’s feeling pretty good until she runs into her ex, John, and his new girlfriend, Haley (Dylan Gelula). The pair showed up at the gala after John heard Molly would be there.

Molly’s initially taken off-guard (which was naturally John’s intention), but Nicholas and Sofia convince her to take the high road. She hijacks a photoshoot to seem magnanimous in public, and that appears to get John thinking he should apologize. So he invites her into the green room to try to do so, but he blows it. He says that ultimately she’ll never be his equal.

He then drops a death blow: He says he called the awards people and said that they should give Molly the award.

Molly tries to ditch quietly with her wounded pride. But when her co-workers hear she wants to leave before her award, they drop what they’re doing and leave with her. Molly finds this heartening, so she decides to go back and make her acceptance speech. And she dedicates the win to her team, giving them the award instead of taking it herself.

The perils of nice comedy

Loot recap Apple TV+: Maya Rudolph, right, hits the right notes, but is <em>Loot</em> just too nice?
Maya Rudolph, right, keeps turning in fantastic performances. But is Loot too nice for its own good?
Photo: Apple TV+

TV veteran Miguel Arteta directs again this week and for the most part does a great job handling the interpersonal dynamics between Molly and her team. He does, however, blow a kind of big moment when Molly says she’s leaving and the whole cast comes out to join her in solidarity. It’s just too earnest — and the writing doesn’t help.

Unfortunately, Loot can’t decide it’s going to be just a conventional sitcom with swearing, or something more substantive, and the in-between place in which it has found itself does nobody any favors.

Rudolph does a great job this week, even if once more the writers basically made it impossible for her to lose in the audience’s eyes. Making John so outwardly villainous erases any complications about rooting for Molly and giving her the easy wins every few minutes.

On the one hand, it’s nice. But on the other hand it’s not anything else, either. Any further down this road, and we’re headed for another Ted Lasso, in which the virtues of kindness turned an English football club into the Magic School Bus. I need more than niceness, even if it’s a good shade on Rudolph.

★★☆☆

Watch Loot on Apple TV+

New episodes of Loot arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.

Rated: TV-MA

Watch on: Apple TV+

Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.

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