Guy Branum, Luke Macfarlane, Francesca Delbanco, Nicholas Stoller, Rose Byrne, and Seth Rogen attend Apple’s Platonic event in L.A.Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
It all started with a mullet.
Or at least what Seth Rogen recalls when asked about the second season production of his hilarious Apple TV+ series Platonic, in which his character, a bar manager named Will, adopts the business-in-the-front-party-in-the-back hairstyle that thematically signifies the ne’er-do-well’s arrested development.
“There was this gentleman who came in as a grip as we were finishing shooting The Studio, and he had this mullet and instantly my hair and makeup team, who we share across shows, knew that oh yeah, we like that,” Rogen says with his trademark chuckle. “It was the perfect look for my character. I don’t even know the guy’s name, but maybe he’ll see this interview and clue in.”
The mullet – which Rogen is careful to emphasize was in fact a wig that was removed at the end of every shooting day (“it was a merkin situation”) – is just one of the many small but significant details that make up Platonic’s delightfully hilarious and eccentric vision of Los Angeles, where Will and his best friend Sylvia (Rose Byrne) endure all manner of comic misadventures.
Picking up where the first season left off – with Will set to marry the CEO of a brewing empire, and Sylvia finding some level of peace with her ultra-considerate lawyer husband Charlie (Luke Macfarlane) – the second batch of Platonic episodes represents something of the platonic ideal of a streaming-era sitcom.
Each 30-minute-or-so episode offers the kind of warm and straight-shooting humour that most television series these days seem allergic to. There is no hidden darkness, no trauma needing to be unearthed. Every tightly edited episode simply provides a great opportunity to hang with characters who you love, even – or perhaps especially – when they get themselves into all manner of forehead-slapping predicaments. In other words, this ain’t The Bear – it’s just funny for funny’s sake.
Each tightly edited episode of Platonic is just funny for funny’s sake and provides a great opportunity to hang with characters who you love.Paul Sarkis/Apple TV+
“We were very clear from the beginning that it’s kind of like trivial, but also in a way relatable – it’s not about things that are extraordinary,” Rogen says in an interview. “You know, divorce, midlife crises, losing your job, having kids, trying to start over. It’s not life or death stakes, or like true trauma. It’s more everyday stuff, and that’s what’s really funny about the show.”
“And it’s light, it’s not heavy stuff,” adds Byrne, sitting alongside her longtime collaborator (in addition to the first season of Platonic, the pair played a married couple in 2014’s Neighbors and its severely underrated 2016 sequel, Neighbors: Sorority Rising). “It’s very clear about that.”
As conceived by Nicholas Stoller and his wife Francesca Delbanco, Platonic has so far not earned the excitable chatter, or Emmy nominations, of Rogen’s other Apple TV+ series, The Studio. Yet it is undoubtedly the more affable and even purely enjoyable of the two, its breezy pacing and note-perfect casting making it one of the more witty small-screen comedies to come along in years. Its extreme levels of comfort might not be possible, though, were it not for the close relationships that make up its behind-the-scenes team.
In addition to the obvious domestic closeness shared between Stoller and Delbanco, the former has been friends with Rogen since their days on Fox’s short-lived campus comedy Undeclared. That sitcom also co-starred Carla Gallo, who appears in Platonic as Cynthia’s best friend, a divorced mom and aspiring podcaster named Katie (and whose adventures with Will this season will surely fulfill the dreams of all the Undeclared fan-fiction writers out there). Meanwhile, Stoller directed the whole gang – Rogen, Byrne, Gallo, plus The Studio’s Ike Barinholtz – in both Neighbors films.
Canadian actor Luke Macfarlane jumped at the chance to once again work with not only his onscreen wife Byrne but also fellow Canadian Rogen.Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
“I’ve known Nick since I was 18, which is also when I met Carla on the show. And with Rose now it’s been almost 15 years, so it feels familial at this point,” Rogen says. “I mostly just think that it’s nice that we can get along and also work so well together. Our sensibilities are still the same, and none of us has done anything that has, you know, exiled us from the industry. I mean, the day is young, but those are all things that aren’t lost on me.”
“I mean Nick gave me my break in comedy,” Byrne adds. “I’d done all this dramatic, very serious stuff. I was solving cases with Glenn Close on Damages, so it was all crime, crime, crime, and I was not the first candidate to be a funny actress by any means, and he took a chance on me.”
Also getting a second chance here is the Canadian actor Macfarlane, who was originally set for big-screen stardom with Stoller’s 2022 comedy Bros, before that same-sex romcom ended up underwhelming at the box office. While the actor got a sizable amount of screen time in the first season of Platonic as Sylvia’s put-upon husband, the character gets a big boost this time around as Charlie endures a midlife crisis that revolves around a deeply strange yet intensely funny appearance on Jeopardy! (This results in the second-best Jeopardy! sitcom moment ever filmed, following John Ratzenberger’s immortal moment with Alex Trebek during a Season 8 episode of Cheers.)
“Nick is a super-busy guy and he came up to me at an event and said, ‘Oh I have this super-funny thing that’s going to happen to you!’ But then I didn’t see any scripts for a long time,” Macfarlane recalls in a separate interview. “But the funny thing was that no one actually knew I was a huge fan of the show. So when I stepped onto the set of Jeopardy!, I was such a fan that I noticed it was a slightly new set. They update it every few months or so. And I noticed that because I do truly watch the show. All the time.”
As for the opportunity to once again work with not only his onscreen wife Byrne and fellow Canadian Rogen but also Stoller, Macfarlane is, as most of the Platonic characters are, gracious to a fault.
“Nick and Francesca are so good at finding these little pieces of comedy. It’s not pratfalls, it’s not gross-out moments, it’s just comedy that comes from observing humans every single day,” the actor says. “The show doesn’t feel loud. It’s grounded in the small things. And that’s where we laugh the most in our lives, isn’t it?”
The first two episodes of Platonic Season 2 are available to stream Aug. 6 on Apple TV+, with new episodes premiering weekly until Oct. 1.
