SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the series finale of “The Other Two,” titled “Brooke & Cary & Curtis & Lance,” streaming now on Max.
In the season and now officially series finale of “The Other Two,” Brooke Dubek (Heléne Yorke) makes an analogy. After months of searching for proof that she’s a good person, Brooke is finally going to win an award for a mental health fundraiser, but she’s terrified of a backlash. “Don’t you remember when Jameela Jamil launched that body positivity app and when everyone accused her of lying about being attacked by bees?” she asks. Not her assistant.
“The Other Two” was a show for people who Doing think of the details of minor celebrities and the social media skirmishes around them. For three seasons, the series thrived on specificity, speaking directly to viewers who understood Brooke perfectly (and managed to throw out a few alternate Jamil controversies for good measure), even though it acknowledged that MO would naturally leave some in the dark. Moving from Comedy Central to the service initially known as HBO Max in Season 2 seemed to give ‘The Other Two’ a new lease of life; linear TV was just the wrong place to find an extreme online audience that could appreciate an entire subplot about Instagays, while streaming was a more natural fit. But “The Other Two” is now over, the niche demo left to find another show made up entirely of inside jokes.
Creators Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, formerly head writers on “Saturday Night Live”, have said they “always knew” the show would end at this point. Despite some mid-credits teasers hinting at a possible future, in practice the events of “Brooke & Cary & Curtis & Lance” serve as a perfect coda to the Dubek family saga. It’s natural to lump the demise of “The Other Two” with the many other victims at parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, most recently including substantial cuts to TCM. Whether or not the conclusion was planned, the show ends at just the right time.
That can be true in several senses of the word. According to the Hollywood reporter, Kelly and Schneider were the subject of both formal HR complaints and an informal whisper network about alleged behind-the-scenes misconduct. That a sharp dissection of the entertainment industry’s amorality might turn out to be a textbook example of it is the kind of irony that “The Other Two” could make a meal of; the finale itself features two Dubeks, mogul Pat (Molly Shannon) and singer Chase (Case Walker), facing an accurately portrayed media backlash for their own behavior. Now it seems that the show’s ability to pierce its subjects came not from observation, but from firsthand experience – a combination of self-awareness and lack thereof, all too common in show business. For now, at least “The Other Two” can be its own accomplishment, the product of a cast, crew, and writer’s room that deserve credit alongside, and possibly apart from, the showrunners.
But even the story of “The Other Two” tended towards a darkness that is both difficult and undesirable to sustain. The show’s title came from the gap between Chase’s and then Pat’s success compared to the slump Brooke and her brother Cary (Drew Tarver), two aimless pursuits. But as the siblings found their respective grooves in talent management and acting, their need for validation only got worse. Cary alienated his best friend with ruthless narcissism; Brooke broke into her ex-fiance’s apartment to try and prove he wasn’t the better person. The show never lost its comedic fastball: Cary wore dragging Billy Porter to promote his voice work as a gay blob, while Brooke designed Chase’s bad boy rebrand complete with facial tattoos. But “The Other Two” was never “Barry,” a show that could potentially transform from a sitcom into a pitch-black drama while remaining recognisably itself.
Instead, “The Other Two” had the Dubeks capture their brass ring and then watch it crumble to dust in their hands. In the finale, Cary finally gets a dose of perspective by watching his agent take care of her dying mother, an indirect echo of his father dying a year before the events of the show. He partially makes amends with his best friend and then has the means to turn down an Oscar ace film starring Harry Styles. For her part, Brooke sacrifices her hard-won public image as a good person in capital letters to do something really good: take the blame for Pat and Chase, thereby saving their careers. Having spent a final season exploring the hollow victories of wealth and fame, “The Other Two” gave its title characters a measure of redemption and, with it, inner peace.
Luck is about as antithetical to comedy as the nihilism “The Other Two” increasingly flirted with in its final installments. So getting the Dubeks to acknowledge what really matters feels like an ideal endnote, neither saccharine nor open-ended (barring Brooke’s postscript). Besides, “The Other Two” had already stretched itself to the limit: just this season, Pat had a sex marathon with Simu Liu on a private jet, Cary planted his face in a diaper, and Brooke went to space – twice. Fans of “The Other Two” will miss his utter devotion to parodies like a “Pleasantville” riff and fluency in a particular language of the pop culture internet. But they can also say goodbye knowing that the show told a complete story about bottomless needs, absurd antics, and the importance of genuine relationships. “The Other Two” was cynical, a look that helped win over its loyal audience, yet secretly sentimental. The finale was true to both.