Apple TV+ comedy Platonic takes a trip to San Diego this week, as Sylvia’s husband Charlie gets paranoid and Will gets a lesson in corporate culture that he didn’t ask for.
In this very good episode of the show — about married Sylvia and divorced Will, who return to the best-friend slot in each other’s lives after an awkward absence — Charlie looks into every little thing, wondering if the pair are more than just friends. Will comes to Sylvia’s rescue at the expense of his friends and business partners, and Sylvia must be honest about the next phase of her life.
Platonic recap: ‘San Diego’
Season 1, episode 8: In the episode, entitled “San Diego,” Sylvia (played by Rose Byrne) has just been fired after her first day at her new law firm. She isn’t taking it well. Hubby Charlie (Luke Macfarlane) and their kids Frances (Sophie Leonard), Simon (Max Matenko) and Maeve (Sophia Kopera) are super-supportive about her new job, which breaks Sylvia’s heart. Simon even made a PowerPoint about how important working women are, which Sylvia watches as she pours herself a glass of wine and starts crying.
So she lies and doesn’t tell them about the firing. The next day she gets dressed, leaves the house and heads right to Will’s (Seth Rogen) bar. She’s embarrassed that she lost the job her husband got her, so she doesn’t want to fess up. Of course, she keeps promising to tell Charlie. But a week passes, and every day she shows up at Will’s bar in a new pantsuit until he finally bans her from the bar until she tells Charlie.
That night, Sylvia finally does tell him (though she doesn’t mention that she returned the painting with a dick for a nose). Charlie takes it surprisingly well. Too well, in fact.
“I can really see both sides of the situation,” Charlie says.
Can I get a witness?
This pisses off Sylvia. She wanted a little more full-throated support. She tells Katie (Carla Gallo) about the situation, looking for support, but Katie’s mind is elsewhere. Her new boyfriend — Will’s business partner Andy (Tre Hale) — is adorably clingy. She lets it drop that Andy, Omar (Vinny Thomas) and Reggie (Andrew Lopez) are heading to San Diego to meet with Johnny Rev (Ted McGinley), the head of a chain of corporate restaurants called Johnny 66.
Because Sylvia is a huge fan of Johnny 66, she insists that Will insist on making the trip with his partners, although Omar, Andy and Reggie told him to sit it out. Will’s been a stick in the mud about expanding the brewery business, believing it to be careerist and the antithesis of why he got into making beer in the first place. But he knows Sylvia wants to go, so he tags along.
Reggie, Andy and Omar are not thrilled Will’s there, believing he’ll screw the pooch on their deal and talk them out of millions of dollars. Johnny 66 wants to carry their beer, but the version they came up with, following Will’s recipe, isn’t up to par. Will tells this to Johnny Rev and, though it looks like the restaurateur’s going to get mad about it, he agrees with Will’s assessment.
Then Johnny invites everyone over to his house for dinner. All’s well that ends well, eh?
Charlie looks for evidence of an affair
Photo: Apple TV+
Meanwhile, Charlie goes looking through his and Sylvia’s iCloud photo storage to find photos for one of the kid’s birthday cards, and he stumbles upon something disconcerting: photos of Sylvia and Will hanging out the day before she told Charlie she was fired. He discovers she was lying to him while she was being honest with Will.
Charlie calls in everyone who’s on hand at the law firm, including Stewart (Guy Branum) and his boss (Michael Kostroff), to sort through the mountains of photographic and geographic evidence of Sylvia and Will’s friendship looking for evidence that they might be having an affair. (It’s a pretty funny sequence.)
They don’t have much luck until someone digs up a picture of the bearded dragon Sylvia brought home for the kids one day. The lizard used to belong to Will, until they liberated it from his ex-wife Audrey’s (Alisha Wainwright) house. Then Will realized he couldn’t take care of it.
However, Sylvia didn’t tell Charlie any of that. She just came home with a lizard one day.
Billions served, thousands missing
At dinner that night, Johnny’s brewmaster (Rachel Rosenbloom) offers to poach Will from his own brewery. And Johnny Rev tries to kiss Sylvia, saying he thought she was “up for grabs.” Will wants to leave after hearing this, but Reggie definitely doesn’t.
Johnny keeps needling Sylvia. And when Will stands up for her, the two men end up fighting each other in Johnny’s backyard. Reggie and Andy are furious, having poured a lot of time and energy into the deal. (They’ve both also been looking forward to the financial windfall that it’s sure to bring.)
Still, Will won’t apologize. That night when Sylvia gets home, she finds Charlie alone in the dark, cradling the bearded dragon like he’s a Bond villain holding a white cat. The jig is up.
Johnny Rev: Score one for fantasy
Photo: Apple TV+
The stuff with Johnny Rev is as on the nose as you’d expect from a well-meaning liberal show about the conditions of contemporary life. He’s a cartoon character, from his car collection to his Hawaiian shirt to his inability to take no for an answer from a woman he wants to sleep with.
It’s thus calculatedly satisfying to see him taken down by Will when he starts behaving badly at dinner, although it’s not terribly realistic.
Still, this episode of Platonic delivered enough laughs that it wouldn’t be worth getting hung up on a few trespasses against subtlety.
★★★★☆
Watch Platonic on Apple TV+
New episodes of Platonic arrive Wednesdays 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 and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, 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.
