This week on Trying, the Apple TV+ show uses the hackiest sitcom elements imaginable as a backdrop for Jason and Nikki’s emotional problems and Scott and Karen’s awakenings.
Tyler is taken by a miscommunication. Jen is having a crisis of confidence at a crossroads in her life (and Nikki’s about to make it worse). Bev’s got Jason and Nikki in a vice, and Karen may have found her calling.
Does any of this matter when every joke makes your skin crawl? No, not really.
Trying recap: ‘What a Banker’
Season 3, episode 7: In the episode, titled “What a Banker,” Nikki (played by Esther Smith), Jason (Rafe Spall), Karen (Sian Brooke) and Nikki and Karen’s parents try to surprise Scott (Darren Boyd) at his big book launch. That means Scott finally must admit to his wife that the publishing world looked at his earnest musings and thought he was doing a parody of himself.
Karen’s a little upset that so many people are laughing at her husband, but he’s trying to make the most of the situation (“Well … they mocked Jesus and he’s everywhere,” Scott says, in one of the few real laughs this show’s ever given me) by telling her it’s a pen name, like George Eliot.
I cannot, however, tell if it’s meant to be a joke that Scott doesn’t know that George Eliot was a woman, because that is exactly the kind of thing someone like Scott would know. And I just cannot give this show the benefit of the doubt anymore.
It’s a little sad that Scott has to give up on his dreams — and actor Boyd actually manages to wring real pathos out of the situation. Scott has to care for the baby, and this is how it makes the most sense to do that.
Karen tries to talk him into writing something he really cares about, but he’s not very good at it. So she steps in to help him, and he realizes that she’s a better writer than she is. Maybe he’s no writer at all. Maybe he’d be better off getting back into investment banking.
Nikki and Jason just need to talk
Nikki’s understandably incensed that Jason lost their money on the stock market and now must drive for a Lyft/Uber-style driving service to make ends meet. She’s also not happy that he told Princess (Eden Togwell) and Tyler’s (Mickey McAnulty) scheming grandmother Bev (Clare Higgins) about their family’s financial situation.
Nikki and Jason want to find time to talk, but with his ride shares, they don’t have much time. So she book a ride with him to get him alone long enough to talk. They finally calm down and sort out some of their issues.
Nikki also has a girl’s night with Jen (Robyn Cara) so she can finally fire her. She leaves Jen with the kids for a minute, and Jen makes all the standard sitcom childcare mistakes in the span of five minutes. She gives the kids coffee, spills the coffee on their clothes, throws a fistful of Tide pods into the washer to clean them, and gives the kids some terrible, not very comforting advice in their time of need.
Yes, Trying is doing “I don’t know how the washer/dryer works” gags in 2022, folks.
Is anybody laughing at these jokes?
The stuff with Nikki and Jason making up, and Scott’s very earnest realization that his life is not remotely the thing he thought it was, saved this week’s episode from complete and utter uselessness. And this week needed the injection of reality bad.
The “young people don’t know how the world works” bits are so hackneyed that sitcoms have been doing them since the ’50s. And they came the same week as a young boy hears his parents talking about a toy (“it’s too small, we’ll have to take it back”) and thinks they mean him.
Plus, we get a reminder that Jen’s girlfriend in the office is named … heavy sigh, what am I doing with my life, I cannot believe I’m typing this … Tinkle (Ntiarna Xavier Knight)?
All of that? It’s too much. It’s way too much. I feel like Karl Havoc watching this show and like that legend … I don’t even wanna be around anymore.
What viewer is going to be charmed by a kid thinking he has to grow several inches overnight or he’ll be taken back to the baby store and also a would-be author learning he has to return to the world of investment banking to raise a family!?? Who on earth is this show for?
A rare glimmer of goodness
Having said that, kudos to Darren Boyd for actually making Scott, a ridiculous caricature, seem like a real human this week. It’s still a disingenuous framing, to be sure, but he does good work with the whole thing anyway.
I mean, we in the audience have been asked to find Scott’s pretentiousness funny for the last three seasons. (Presumably, anyway — I remember so little about this show’s first two seasons, mostly because I try to scrub it from my brain like an embarrassing high school memory the second I’m done watching.)
So the show finding some other, unsavory people to laugh at Scott is just … nonsense. It’s fraudulent. Why is it bad that a Dennis O’Hare character (Scott’s agent, one of the better performances on the show) is laughing at Scott? The writers were laughing at him two episodes ago! They’re still laughing at him now. Bad form, Trying, spectacularly bad form.
★★☆☆☆
Watch Trying on Apple TV+
New episodes of Trying season 3 arrive each Friday.
Rated: TV-14
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.
