Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
BY CASEY ROEPKE ’21
Considering the comedic genius of one of its co-creators, Mae Martin, it’s remarkable how unfunny “Feel Good” is.
It’s not marketed as a pure comedy, and there are enough attempts at melodrama to classify it otherwise, but its attempts at dark comedy fall, well, comically short. In addition to its tonal fizziness, the meatier topics — addiction, queer dating and gender identity (Martin’s she/they pronouns are replaced with she/her in the show) — are handled poorly and without depth. “Feel Good” tries to be so many things, but ends up being a mediocre television program without any teeth.
Loosely autobiographical, “Feel Good” follows Martin’s character (also named Mae Martin), a stand-up comic recently transplanted from Canada to England through the tests of love, family and addiction. The first episode opens with Martin’s comedy set, where she cracks a few bland jokes about her life. At the comedy club, she meets the show’s secondary protagonist and her eventual girlfriend, George (Charlotte Ritchie). After some awkward back-and-forth dialogue and flirting, they start dating.
Fast forward several months with a montage and they’re living together. This montage mechanism does Mae and George’s relationship a great disservice — without any context, the audience is left to grasp at straws as to how the two characters interact. As we see pretty soon after the first episode, there are many red flags in their relationship. The show’s creators assume that the viewers can just accept that Mae and George love each other without giving any clues as to why, and flattens what could be a deeply layered and complex dynamic to a one-dimensional relationship.
The characters have the potential for nuance, but instead, the show’s writing and actors’ portrayal reduce this nuance to slick archetypes. Mae is emotional, sensitive, openly gay and secretive about her recovery from drug addiction. George is the opposite in many regards, and acts as an inexpressive foil to Mae’s moodiness. George’s main character trait is “closeted,” a poor choice on the part of the creators. Mae is the first woman that George has dated, and George refuses to let Mae meet any of her friends or family. She would be a more sympathetic character if the show delved into her fear of ostracization or judgment by her clearly homophobic and superficial friends, but instead the writers focus on her as a “straight” figure, again and again. Surrounding characters, even queer ones, constantly label George as straight, and George herself asks Mae to become more masculine for her, refuses to reciprocate in their relationship — emotionally or sexually — and uses Mae as a vessel for her own self-discovery. It’s a tired trope in queer entertainment, and this newest portrayal offers no insight or pushback to fix it. Not only is it an embarrassing depiction in an otherwise progressive show, but it leaves the audience flummoxed at the finale’s flailing attempt at George’s redemption. After six episodes of George largely ignoring Mae’s feelings and trying to mask her own, why would the viewers care about her?
Mae’s character comes off a little better, and it helps that Martin is so endearing on-screen. But the show shies away from any meaningful contributions to what could be powerful discourse. After being encouraged by her detached mother (a brilliant yet campy cameo by Lisa Kudrow), Mae starts attending regular Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Instead of depicting it as a sign of progress, the show falls into the all-too-familiar trap of treating the other attendees without a hint of compassion. The other members of the support group include an unhinged mother who stalks her daughter, a smarmy businessman, a pushover facilitator and a compulsive liar who has never even taken drugs. They could have been portrayed with empathy and used to demonstrate the nondiscrimination of addiction, its effects across denominational lines and how recovery is not linear but still worth pursuing. Instead, these wacky characters are aimed at validating Mae’s holier-than-thou attitude and showing that Mae doesn’t need organizational recovery because she has George.
Not all TV shows or movies need to have a moral arc; in fact, in this time of quarantine and social distancing, audiences are increasingly turning to mindless shows for escapism and a dose of numbing. But “Feel Good” is clearly trying to teach its viewers some grand ethical lessons about life, love and family. It fails on each of these counts, through poor character portrayals and shoddy development, insensitively scripted dialogue and just plain bad plot devices. It even fails to redeem itself comedically — “Feel Good” accomplishes just one thing: making its viewers feel bad.