I very much enjoy the tweet formulation that runs “I am [insert physiological/mental/cultural diagnostic term here] years old”, but have never managed to find my own. Now I have. I am “Michael Douglas is forever fixed in my mind as the lizard-eyed creep in the green polyester V-neck watching Sharon Stone in the nightclub in Basic Instinct” years old. I’ve seen him in Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile, Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, Falling Down, The Wonder Boys, even as Liberace five years ago in HBO’s biopic Behind the Candelabra, and nothing has managed to obscure that mental image. Now, perhaps, thanks to the passage of time and the advent on Netflix of The Kominsky Method, I may come to know some peace.
In this latest creation from the prolific Chuck Lorre (a much bleaker offering than his usual three-camera, half-hour sitcoms such as Two and a Half Men and Dharma and Greg), the 74-year-old Douglas plays an ageing, formerly successful actor turned acting coach Sandy Kominsky, who is trying to navigate his and his prostate’s way through the third act of life in an increasingly unforgiving world. He is accompanied by his longtime agent and best friend, Norman (Alan Arkin, endlessly wonderful) who, by the end of episode one – in scenes quite devastating, given how little time the audience has had by that time to become invested, a tribute to the talent of all involved – has lost his wife of nearly 50 years to cancer.
As a portrait of ageing masculinity and friendship, it’s wonderful. The two leads are fantastic apart, revelling in intelligently written parts that give them plenty of laughs to play, in addition to well-earned emotional highs as flawed, believable, fully rounded human beings. And they are even better together, bantering gently and – especially in Norman’s grief – bitterly, as full of love and antagonism as only old friends can be. When Norman tells Sandy he didn’t get a sitcom part he went for, “but they say they’ll keep you in mind for a recurring role or a cameo”, Sandy tells him not to sugarcoat things. “I’m not sugarcoating,” Norman says. “I’m lying.”
Where it’s not so wonderful is in anything outside Norman, Sandy and their relationship. All of Sandy’s young students are interchangeably needy, praise-hungry dolts who might as well be listed “Millennial Snowflake #1/#2/#3 …” in the credits. In the first episode alone, one clutches the advice to wash his hair before a shampoo ad audition as if it dropped from the lips of Stanislavski. And one has written a spec TV script called Incestuously Yours. “It’s a comedy. But without jokes.” “So, no laughing?” asks Sandy. “Hopefully not,” replies the writer.
Other characters don’t fare much better. Mindy (Sarah Baker) is Sandy’s put-upon daughter with not much more to do than nag her dad to visit his sick friends and call a plumber out again to the drama class’s recalcitrant toilets. Nancy Travis as a divorcee spending her settlement on becoming a mature student taking Sandy’s class and who ends up as his rare “age-appropriate” date (despite Travis and her character being 20 years younger than Sandy/Douglas) is little more than a satellite orbiting the leads. The less said about Lisa Edelstein as Sandy’s loathsome, irredeemable daughter whose opioid addiction is offered as comic relief, the better.
Whether these underwritten or misfiring younger and/or female characters are the result of 66-year-old Lorre’s unwillingness or inability to investigate outside his own experience in any depth (his previous creations by and large only requiring superficial signifiers and broad brushwork) or a desire to protect himself, his characters or his stars from looking too out-of-step or vulnerable, or from being too challenged by other talents, is an intriguing question. There is one tiny and rather lovely moment early on when Sandy refers in a speech to all his students as “he or she” and then, noticing an androgynous figure shifting ever so slightly in the front row, swiftly adds questioningly, respectfully – “They?” The student nods with a small smile, Sandy nods sweetly and gratefully back and carries on. It takes a couple of seconds, but in there is the hint of what the show could be if it gets its two halves working together and on equal terms. Arkin and Douglas can surely take it. If a second season is greenlit, let’s hope Lorre steps up.
