Easy does it
It’s a clever formula that the Netflix Dramedy Easy does. Get regular looking people in remarkable but relatable situations, write all the dialogue in a mumblecore script, place them in hip Chicago and there you have it: Easy. Perhaps the initial title for the story had been Accessible. It’s cool because its so understated. Mumblecore provides an air of authenticity - in that actors aren’t dropping big lines for dramatic effect and the characters often misunderstand each other - just like real life.
Only it isn’t.
The place where Easy falls is that everything is played so safely. The character’s lives are generally good - the hurdles put in their way are usually an easy hop - usually some small humiliation or a complexity in a relationship. A woman is pregnant and doesn’t want to tell her boyfriend, a husband and wife try opening up their marriage.
In perhaps the most memorable story-line a street keeps having its Amazon packages stolen. It begins with a kid-friendly street fair to establish just how harmonious and neighbourly they are. This harmony is shattered when a robber begins to steal their mail-order packages. Working together this neighbourhood watch begins to employ increasingly paranoid means of tracking down the thief - installing security camera, confronting random youths in the street.
Things begin to go awry. The comment is how thin the veil of suburban civility is. It’s a theme as old as Richard Yates Revolutionary Road (1961), updated for Amazon and the internet of things’ security cameras. There was scope in this story to explore less exhausted territory - in one part a character says “he looks Mexican” when the robber is caught on camera in a hood. It’s impossible to see the character. Two black extras scowl at the inherent racism but they are never given any lines. Black people are allowed to live in this upper middle class neighbourhood but they are not allowed to talk.
Far more brave would have been for the street to break along racial lines. This could be an updated Do The Right Thing set in suburban Chicago. It would have been brave and interesting but it would not have been Easy.
Instead the promising subject matter is squandered. The character Lindsay played by Aubrey Plaza fights back against the increasing paranoia of the street’s inhabitants. They are letting one small incident corrode their harmony. When they ask what she thinks they should do - she says “Buy locally”. It’s a comment that drops then evaporates instantly. How Amazon goods arrived at their front doors is kept out of sight and another opportunity to explore the cost of their lifestyle in any depth goes with it.
Perhaps I am expecting too much from Easy. Yet for a show that so pathologically hip, it demands an excruciatingly hip analysis - expose what makes it “problematic”. In such an analysis it falls into the trap of a social focus that belongs in the 90s - stories about are rooted in the upper-middle class that mostly live in ritzy apartments or giant houses; the men are mostly normal looking but most the women are mostly gorgeous. The non-white characters have arrived in the upper middle class and their lives exhibit none of the quiet desperation of a show like Atlanta.
In the end you ask ‘what is wrong with some easy entertainment?’ In a way, nothing. Yet in another way - the drive at realism and authenticity should not skim over the difficulties and complexities in life in such a glib way. That’s not Easy. It’s lazy.