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A TV comedy about adults that rings true

 
From left, Melanie Lynskey, Amanda Peet, Mark Duplass, Abby Ryder Fortson, and Steve Zissis in Togetherness.
From left, Melanie Lynskey, Amanda Peet, Mark Duplass, Abby Ryder Fortson, and Steve Zissis in Togetherness.
Published Jan. 14, 2015

Brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, who have made many movies together as writers, directors and actors — including The Puffy Chair, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon and Jeff, Who Lives at Home — have a TV series now. It's called Togetherness and premiered this week on HBO. It is a lovely, melancholic comedy about adults, for adults.

Elsewhere on television, Mark is one of the stars of The League; Jay plays Jeffrey Tambor's son on Transparent; and together they play the midwives in the office upstairs on The Mindy Show. Jay, who co-wrote and co-directed with Mark, stays behind the camera.

On Togetherness, Mark plays Brett, who is married to Michelle (Melanie Lynskey); they have two young children and a stable but marginally unsatisfying life. Michelle, who feels the weight of routine, longs for something unexpected; Mark, who loves his work but not his job — he is a creatively frustrated sound designer for film and the family's sole support — seeks refuge in the familiar.

Into their Eagle Rock Craftsman house comes Brett's best friend, Alex (Steve Zissis, who co-wrote the story), a little-employed actor "too fat for the leading man roles and too skinny to be the chubby best friend," who has just been evicted from his apartment. He is followed shortly by Michelle's sister, Tina (Amanda Peet), visiting from Houston, who decides to stay after a breakup. Each is a hot mess, but not merely a hot mess. And that is just enough new stress to set things tumbling.

Like Enlightened, Girls and Transparent, the series transfers to the no-longer-quite-so-small screen the concerns and aesthetics of independent film, particularly the style called "mumblecore," with its focus on character, naturalistic dialogue and subdued, often indefinite plotting.

As the name might imply, the difficulty of communication between individuals—- indeed, the near-impossibility of ever really saying what one means — characterizes the genre both in content and form. Awkwardness, and the likelihood of whatever one says being the wrong thing, is its anxious resting state.

Much writing for television (and film) might be characterized as Newtonian — there is a cause for every effect, things move relentlessly forward. Plots can seem reverse-engineered, in order to bring things to a certain end, or cliffhanger; characters change to accommodate the needs of the story, not from any internal, organic logic.

What's going on in Togetherness is something more lifelike, something that might be called a quantum comedy, couched in ambiguities and spooky entanglements, where action meets inaction, indecision amounts to decision and what feels like clear-sightedness just a new kind of confusion. To stay together or not to break up; to move on or not to stay still; to be or not to not be?

Though certain passages and conceits do have the feel of being "of the movies" or of TV — that Brett and Michelle are not having sex is an overworked dilemma nowadays, and there are some fanciful characters and a few rom-com tropes ahead — what is happening on screen at any moment has a ring of truth; there's a life in it. None of the characters gets everything right, or nothing right.

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Much of this depends on the actors, of course, who make their characters vivid without any sacrifice of subtlety. Peet, whose Tina is unhappily single on the edge of 40, reminds you of just how good and adaptable an actress she is. Lynskey, who plays next-door-stalker Rose on Two and a Half Men but also has a long history in independent film, is all deep waters and live wires; soft and steely, trying on new personas for size, her Michelle becomes the series' gravitational center. You can feel her feeling.

Duplass is sympathetic as a man surprised both by his dissatisfaction and the stiffness he's acquired to maintain it; and Zissis — to whom more conventional shows would relegate character parts, or make pathetic as he grows more interested in Tina — turns in a performance of great, if often clownish, dignity.

There are marvelous set pieces in Togetherness — party scenes, a game of kick the can — but even when nothing particular is happening, it feels like life.