As Amazon began to play the second episode of the new Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen comedy, Forever, my first instinct was to look for the remote and find something else.
It wasn’t that the first episode was awful, it just didn’t produce a lot of laughs, or bring up any themes that hadn’t been explored in a hundred other movies and series before it. With so many programming options available in the days of streaming services, it takes something special to really captivate an audience, and the dramedy just wasn’t pulling me in. Luckily, the remote was more than an arms length away, and, by the time I had grabbed it, episode two had thrown a curveball at me that I didn’t see coming.
Forever opens by giving viewers a glimpse into how the forty-somethings couple of June (Rudolph) and Oscar (Armisen) met, fell in love, got married, and then fell gradually into the monotony of their lives together. They were brilliantly able to convey all this history through an opening montage without any audible dialogue in just a few minutes, before dropping us into a series of clever comedic riffs.
As indicated, the premise of trying to break the day-to-day of a dull existence has been done several times over. Here, June and Oscar decide that foregoing their annual trip to their lake house in favor of a ski trip is the way to go. As one would imagine, their issues are not magically solved once they hit the slopes. If anything, they just run into them head on. The biggest problem in their relationship is that while June clearly loves Oscar, she is desperate for something new, while he seems perfectly content with keeping things the way they are forever.
There are jokes that work well in the first episode and some that require specific tastes to hit. If you enjoy Armisen and Rudolph, then it should be an enjoyable watch, even if Rudolph is slightly subdued to convey how her character has lost a bit of her enthusiasm through the years. A discussion over the best way to spend 30 free minutes serves as an illustration of the type of humor and banter to expect as the show progresses past its conventional beginnings and on to the rest of the season.
It makes sense that the first episode of Forever is currently the lowest rated of the eight that are available. If viewers had a wait a week to tune back in and see where the show was going, I think that few would, so it works perfectly being available on Amazon, where it can be easily binged in a day. It’s difficult to deliver anything today that is going to surprise an audience, especially with all the marketing that usually goes into a show. With that in mind, I’m not going to give anything away about where the show goes from here and just suggest that you devote about an hour and a half to view 3 episodes and decide how you feel about it.
Overall Rating: 6 out of 10
-Ben Murchison
