The Friend Is The Benefit

There are times when friends are fighting when no punches are pulled. In the second season of the exceptional Apple TV+ comedy Platonic, we see Rose Byrne's Sylvia and Seth Rogen's Will really going at it.

- RAJA SEN

There are times when friends are fighting when no punches are pulled. In the second season of the exceptional Apple TV+ comedy Platonic, we see Rose Byrne's Sylvia and Seth Rogen's Will really going at it. She is significantly upset at lines he has crossed. He is aggrieved that those lines exist in the first place. Both of them are indignant and wounded and sore, having it out with that brutal honesty only afforded to true friends. Then, mid-fight, Will makes a joke. It isn't a particularly good line, but Sylvia, mid-fight, is instantly compelled to acknowledge and even applaud this clumsy bit of innuendo. Palms are slapped, fives are exchanged, but the argument goes on. Respect. It's what keeps a friendship together. I had thoroughly enjoyed the first season of Platonic back in 2023, primarily because the show—created and directed by Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller—understood how vital it is to keep old friendships alive as we ourselves get older, as well as the fact that a true friendship can often be entirely incomprehensible to those outside it. They don't get the co-dependence, the overreliance, the oversharing, the exact flavor of the nuttiness—and they don't have to.

By obliterating the will-they-won't-they undercurrent holding most sitcom twosomes in place,