‘Platonic’ Creators Talk Season 2 Of Apple TV Comedy Series

Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen in “Platonic,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Courtesy of Apple TV+

In a media landscape saturated with steamy romance and grisly homicides, only one show stands alone: Platonic.

The title isn’t some clever ruse hinting at a casual friendship destined to become romantic. The Apple TV+ comedy series genuinely lives up to its name. Not at all!

The non-sexual bond between stay-at-home mom Sylvia (Rose Byrne) and brewmaster Will (Seth Rogen) remains as casual as ever in the show’s sophomore season — and that’s the way it’s going to stay. Platonic’s married co-creators, Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller, aren’t interested in playing by the usual rules.

“All TV is [either] sex or murder, and we have neither,” notes Stoller, who previously directed Byrne and Rogen in the two Neighbors movies. “It makes storytelling hard … [but it also] forces us to dig deep in terms of the story and not lean on some TV tropes. I think it ends up making the storytelling kind of interesting and weird and unique.”

“It’s a big challenge,” echoes Delbanco. “I love a ‘will they, won’t they’ show. I like to write them. I like to watch them. It’s not a knock against that, but this show just has a different project, and it’s in the name. It’s a challenge to figure out ways to tell stories that don’t involve any kind of ‘will they or won’t they.’ That’s the challenge we set for ourselves with the series, and we’re enjoying it.”

Like Seinfeld, Platonic isn’t really about anything in particular and yet, the random misadventures of two once-estranged best friends make for a breath of fresh television…

Platonic creators talk Season 2 of Apple TV+ comedy series starring Rose Byrne & Seth Rogen

Josh Weiss: Just to start off, take me back to the beginning. Where did the idea for Platonic originally come from?

Francesa Delbanco: The series was my idea and based on experiences I had in my own life. I used to have a lot of male friends when I was in college and in my 20s while living in New York. I had friends who were women, I had friends who were men. I didn’t really distinguish between the two. I didn’t think that would ever change. I would go out to dinner with my friends who were guys, I would see plays, I would go for drinks, etc. Then life moved along. I got engaged and married, we had children and a family. I looked around and was like, “I have fewer male friendships than I used to when I was younger.” My friendships with the women in my life from that time had stayed as strong and vibrant as ever, and [while]

my friendships with the men from that time of my life still existed, they had taken on a very different meaning, I was very close friends with a lot of their wives, and I would still see them when we would all go out to dinner together or have group events like weddings. But that socializing one-on-one had kind of fallen away and I started thinking about, “When did that happen? Why did that happen? Is it true of other people around me?” And it sort of was. So we started trying to think about why that was and then thought we could make a show out of it.

Nicholas Stoller: This is something that we had talked about a lot. When we would go to dinner and I would be talking to the guy, and she would be talking to the wife, [though] the guy was originally her friend. But we would come home and she’d be like, “It’s so weird that that always happens.” And then when we were trying to think of another show after Friends From College, and she said, “What about a show about a show about a platonic friendship?” And I said, “Oh, that’s amazing!” There’s such a deep well of stuff there and weirdly, it hasn’t really been done before. We talk about it in the pilot, [but] the thing that everyone talks about is when Harry Met Sally, which is not about a platonic friendship. It’s about a romantic relationship. And so, we were thinking about, “Oh, this is strangely an area that hasn’t been explored.”

Weiss: Going off that, Platonic is a very slice-of-life kind of show. What’s your secret to writing these day-to-day these stories while still keeping them engaging?

Delbanco: I think we take a lot from our own lives. We take a lot from the lives of the writers who write on the show with us. We take a lot from things we’ve observed with friendships and really try to keep all of that stuff grounded. In this season, a friend of theirs from college comes in from out of town to visit. What’s it like when they’re a threesome and not a twosome? Just things that that are, as you said, kind of like lo-fi ideas that happen to all of us in our normal lives … We do try to pick stories that feel like they are really the stuff of our lives and middle-aged life, in a way.

Stoller: We’ll sometimes start big and broad, and then it slowly gets smaller and smaller, more and more grounded. We really grind the stories in the writers’ room. The only thing that annoys me when I’m watching anything is if it’s boring. [When someone says], “The season gets great in Episode 6!” I’m like, “No. The job is to entertain right off the bat.” And so, we grind pretty hard in the writers’ room to make the stories entertaining right off the bat, and to keep it moving. Hopefully, it feels light and kind of simple, but that’s after a lot of us banging our heads against the wall.

Weiss: Nicholas, you previously worked with Rose and Seth on the Neighbors films. Was casting them in Platonic just a natural extension of that?

Stoller: Yeah, they have such incredible chemistry. It’s one of those things that you just hope will happen between your leads. I think they felt it too on those Neighbors movies. No one really cracks Seth up more than Rose. They really find each other delightful. And so, when we were figuring out Platonic, the first person we wanted to go to for Sylvia was Rose. We went to her and asked if she was into the idea. Then we asked her who she would want to work with and she was like, “Well, Seth.” So we went to Seth. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to do TV and he was instantly like, “Oh, Rose is doing it? Yeah, let’s do it!” So it was a very swift process. We felt very lucky.

Weiss: How much of themselves did Rose and Seth bring to their characters?

Stoller: [They brought themselves] a lot more in the in the first season, because we were really all trying to figure out the tone of the show and the characters. So in the first season, there were a lot of conversations about [it]. But even in this season, they are both very involved in their looks. Seth’s look is an awesome, big swing. He had this idea for his look that we thought was hilarious and so specific. He was like, “I think I should have a mullet.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” He’s like, “Every dude has a mullet.” And we were like, “That’s not true.” Then I walked outside and 2was like, “Oh he’s totally right. Every dude does have a mullet!”

Delbanco: That’s the fun of collaborating with really smart actors and comedians, is that they want to make sure they really understand the character and what can make them funny. We have table reads for the show and afterwards, there’s always long conversations about, “I don’t understand why she would ever do this.” Then we have to go back to the drawing board.

NICHOLAS: Rose has amazing emotional logic. In addition to being so hilarious and smart, she is also very polite, like, “But would she do that…?” We’re like, “Oh, wait, you’re right, she wouldn’t do that!” It’s one of the great things about getting to work with them, honestly. It’s not just them saying the lines. They’re both producers on the show and really plus the material.

FRANCESCA: Yeah, they really inhabit those characters and know what they would and wouldn’t do as well as we do.

Weiss: What would you say is the general arc of Season 2?

Stoller: We originally set this up as an anthology show. We didn’t think that Seth and Rose would want to do more than one season. So we thought, “Well, each season will tell a different platonic friendship.” And about halfway through shooting the first season, we were like, “This is magical. We should ask them if they’d want to do more.” We asked them, they said yes, and Apple was into the idea. But the problem was we’d already written a season that was an anthology and tied up [the story] in a nice bow. We did a little bit of rewriting as we were shooting, just so it wasn’t so over, over. Originally, the first season ended with Seth’s fiancée being pregnant, and that just would have caused a whole lot of problems in the second season. It was pretty challenging, blowing up the neat bow we had put on the end of the first season. It was figuring out, “How can we put their lives back into a chaotic situation?”

Delbanco: Once we figured out a way into the second season that undid some of the nice, happy endings we had given them in the first season, we did have the experience of realizing, in a fun way, that this could go on and on. Meaning, they could have infinite problems in their lives at the same time, and they could infinitely be friends and involved in each other’s lives. In the first season, it sort of feels like a moment in time, and that it’s over. And in this season, we really wanted to try to suggest that it wouldn’t be over, and that they would stay friends with each other and get into increasingly bigger messes. We wanted to set it up as these two will be back together again for more shenanigans, if we’re fortunate enough to get to write another season of stuff for them.

Weiss: Do you guys have a specific takeaway, thematic or otherwise, when it comes to Platonic?

Delbanco: I think we both feel like it’s really a show about middle age told through this friendship. It’s a show about the trials and challenges of being the ages that we are, where you’re juggling some kind of work life and some kind of family life. You’re supposed to be a grown up, you’re supposed to have things figured out. But what if you don’t feel that way? What if you feel like you’re out of step with your peer group? What if things didn’t work out exactly the way you thought they would? And then we also feel like it has a kind of fantasy element, which is, “What if you got to go back and be best friends with your friend from a time in your life where you had none of those concerns? What if you two could recapture some of that crazy freedom?”

Stoller: There is a wish fulfillment to it. And I think it is a love story, but it’s a platonic love story … It’s not going to evolve past that. The complications and importance of friendship is another core thing in the show. They are ultimately good for each other and help each other out and help each other through their trials and tribulations in life.

Weiss: Nicholas, you’ve directed some all-time classic comedies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek. What makes for quality laughs in your opinion?

Stoller: I think all good comedy is inherently dramatic and has a dramatic structure. Being as honest as possible is always what makes people laugh. The only note I ever hear that annoys me is when someone’s like, “Make them likable.” I don’t know what that is, but if you make your characters relatable and you give them real, honest problems and [allow them to] make mistakes… People love watching characters make mistakes, because we all make mistakes. [It’s all about] trying to dig deep and figure out, “What is the most honest moment around a situation?” That’s always what’s going to make your thing really funny.

New episodes of Platonic debut on Apple TV+ every Wednesday