Writer-director-actress Julie Delpy is perhaps best known for her work in the “Before Trilogy” with Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke. But those who are familiar with her directing work, from the duo of relationship comedies “2 Days In Paris” and “2 Days In New York,” to her more recent films “Lolo” and “My Zoe” likely have a deeper understanding of her creative bent. Delpy’s interests lie in the imperfections of women. Her characters are neurotics, workaholics, and lately, mothers who always seem to have unstable relationships with the men in their lives.
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This sensibility is drawn out to the extreme in her new Netflix comedy series “On The Verge,” which she created, wrote, and directed. The show follows four middle-aged Los Angeleno women—Justine (Delpy), Anne (Elisabeth Shue), Yasmin (Sarah Jones), and Ell (Alexia Landeau)—as they struggle to balance work, family, and friendship.
In a clear homage/lampoon of “Sex and the City,” the series begins with Delpy’s Justine hovering over her laptop, voiceover illuminating her typing process as she attempts to find the right word to describe the existential hole in which women often find themselves. We soon discover Justine is a chef who owns her own restaurant in Venice. The book should be a simple cookbook, but Justine’s bleak outlook on life has bled into the prose.
We then meet her deprecating husband, Martin (Mathieu Demy), who spends much of the show bemoaning the sacrifice he made in choosing to live in L.A. with Justine and their son, Albert (Christopher Convery), rather than staying in Paris. His architecture style is not appreciated here, so you see he’s always out of work and emasculated. While Delpy and Demy have great chemistry in that you believe their barbs cut deep, the repetition of Martin’s dour narcissism starts to drag on as the show progresses.
As for Justine’s friend group, their stories remain equally hard to care about. Take Anne, an heiress in the midst of expanding her fashion business from kid’s clothes to a women’s line. She’s a Whole Foods-shopping, CBD-ingesting hippie who lives on the beach with her son, Seb, and their ornery German au pair, Gretchen (Jennifer E. Gardner). Her biggest emotional arc is to stop taking obscene amounts of money from her controlling mother and cutting the purse strings from her estranged freeloading husband (Troy Garity).
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When we meet Yasmin she’s attempting to re-enter the job market after a long gap raising her son, Orion (Jayden Haynes-Starr). What could have been an interesting exploration of agism and helicopter parenting, devolves into a bizarre subplot in which her Persian cousin convinces her to become a spy, sort of. This convulsion isolates Yasmin from much of the action during the latter half of the show, limiting her opportunities to interact with the other actresses.
Then there’s Ell, supposedly the poor friend. A single mother with three mixed-race kids from three different men, a feat she is quite proud of to the point she refers to her family as “The United Colors of Benetton.” At one point, her bank account is overdrawn by $1,200, yet a few episodes later she’s able to invest in the newest iPhone in order to turn her topsy-turvy family into a YouTube show. It’s unclear how she keeps a roof over her kids’ heads and the show never seems to focus long enough to really delve into the economic disparity between her family and the other three women.
While it is refreshing to get a show featuring four female leads over the age of forty, it’s hard to relate to the privilege of these women, despite the show desperately trying to project them as ordinary. They live and work on the West Side of Venice—one of the city’s richest neighborhoods. There is mention of the area’s growing houseless population, but mostly in the liberal “oh this is bad” without delving much deeper into the optics of these characters mostly ignoring the issue.
Each of the characters balances the particulars of parenting Gen Z children, from the kids preparing for active shooter drills—referred to by Justine’s son as “man-made emergencies”—to Anne’s child Seb’s burgeoning queerness. While aspects of this are handled quite well, especially when the child actors are given room to explore the complicated dynamics of their generation, there are several moments that just don’t work at all.
When Justine’s son asks if they are rich, she says they’re well off but plays off their privilege by saying if she lost her job—a reminder she is a popular chef with her own restaurant who through the course of the show wrote and released a popular cookbook—they would lose their house. In another scene, he’s upset learning about white people’s complicity in slavery, to which she admits that France was colonial, but they don’t have any slaveholder ancestors. Assuring him their ancestors were cheese and goat farmers. If anywhere in this show showed some self-awareness that these characters are awful, these scenes could be excused away as satire, but the show never seems to operate quite on that level.
Further, all of their children appear to attend “progressive” private schools and at least two of the women have full-time private childcare after school. These characters are either seen as overly eager to please like Yasmin’s Latinx nanny who says they’re like her “family,” or used as fodder for jokes about lazy, promiscuous teens like Anne’s German au pair.
Mentions of the impending pandemic make their way into the last few episodes of the season, with the final episode taking place on February 29, 2020. While there were mentions of other real-life events—Trump, the increasing houselessness in Venice, etc.—this insertion feels awkward and inorganic. Perhaps the aim is to explore how these horrid characters would handle life during lockdown if the show is picked up for another season. Whatever the reason, using the announcement of the first coronavirus death in America as a dramatic cliffhanger beat feels incredibly in poor taste.
We definitely need more shows about complex women over the age of forty, I’m just not sure a show about the plights of the extremely privileged, albeit quasi-liberal, is exactly filling in the most glaring gap in terms of representation. Like the pussy hat-wearing binders full of women, this brand of feminism feels woefully out of touch and in deep need of a crash course in intersectionality. [C-]
“On the Verge” is available now on Netflix.