Note: This story contains spoilers from “Platonic” Season 2, Episode 10.
After a season of Rose Byrne’s Sylvia striving for a career of her own in “Platonic,” the Season 2 finale sees Sylvia get what she wants, but she couldn’t be farther apart from her husband, Charlie (Luke Macfarlane), her children nor Will (Seth Rogen), who is busy gearing up to open his Sh-tty Little Bar.
“It comes with all the downsides we all know careers have — it takes her away from her children, and it monopolizes a huge amount of her time,” co-creator Francesca Delbanco told TheWrap. “It didn’t feel very real to us that Sylvia would be completely satisfied and completed by some sort of job — that there probably isn’t a job that she could do where she wouldn’t be plagued by self-doubt and … imposter syndrome.”
With Sylvia downtrodden from her demanding job, her ears perk up when Charlie and Stewart (Guy Branum) suggest that, in order to bypass his noncompete, Will should have another person be the face of the business, opening up a new dynamic for Will and Sylvia to be business partners in a potential third season, should Delbanco and Nick Stoller get the green light from Apple TV+.
“We’re very superstitious, so we don’t like try to get too into figuring out what future seasons will be before we hear what’s going to happen, but there is something inherently funny and complex about working with your friend — we just know that that is a rich area,” Stoller said, revealing that they tried to tackle the idea of the pair working together in Season 2 before realizing it was too big of a story for just an episode.
“If we are lucky enough to get a Season 3, it is a great new dynamic for them,” Delbanco said. “It’s something they’ve never done before. It obviously comes with a million inherent tensions that anyone who’s ever worked at anything can imagine.”
Below, Stoller and Delbanco reveal how they reversed from their original plan of an anthology series to extend the Apple TV+ series.
TheWrap: What was your vision or North Star for Season 2 in terms of what you wanted to explore?
Stoller: The first season was meant to be an anthology, and so we had kind of told a complete [story] and then in the middle of the season, we were like, “This is so amazing, and Seth and Rose have irreplaceable chemistry,” so we asked them if they would do more. But we had told a complete kind of story, and so what we started to work on in the writers’ room was figuring out how to blow up the little, neat bow we put on the end of the season. It forced us to dig deep and figure out … a different kind of story to tell, and what we ended up kind of settling on was kind of flipping the dynamic. So now it’s Sylvia intervening in a relationship that Will is in and then, about halfway through the season, the story turns and becomes a focus on a Sylvia’s marriage.
Delbanco: We wanted to stay in the same world of Season 1 … about this specific friendship, but it’s also a show about some of the challenges of middle-aged life, and some of the areas that we could focus on, like marriage and families and career stuff. We are getting at all of those things through the lens of this adult friendship and the importance of friendship in middle age, but it’s really an exploration of everything about this phase of life that we’re in.
The green light for Season 2 seemed to be a bit in limbo until Seth did an interview that seemed to help usher in an official renewal. Was there a Season 2 planning happening behind the scenes?
Delbanco: The strike happened the minute season one was released, and the green light for Season 2 happened when the strike ended.
Stoller: It was performance based. Seth and Rose, both, during the shoot were like, “Oh, if we got to do more, we would love to,” and then the strike kind of messed stuff up.
Delbanco: That was a kind of squirrelly time where no decisions could be made. We came out then, which was difficult in its own way, because we couldn’t really promote it … there wasn’t like the robust rollout of a season of TV that you love to have as a creator, but everybody did their best. And then the strike ended, and here we are.
The end of Season 1 established that Will had already found a fiancée in San Diego and that Sylvia would help plan his wedding. How did you shape out the character of Jenna and what lessons did you want to set up for Will and Sylvia with him in this relationship?
Delbanco: We had imported and created the character of Jenna to give Will a happy resolution to his story at the end of Season 1, and then when we realized we were going back in, we were like, “Well, we can’t have just everybody be happy and settled in their own lives in two cities that are hundreds of miles apart,” so we knew we had to mess things up a little bit. We do feel like Sylvia and Charlie’s marriage is kind of sacred in this show. They have lots of trials and tribulations in Season 2, and I’m sure would continue to for any seasons we would get, but we don’t like necessarily picture them splitting up. So we were like, “Well, then it’s gonna have to be Will.” And we, just logistically for the show’s sake, needed him to be back in L.A. — it’s too hard to tell a story of like friends who are long distance living completely separate lives. His marriage will be what we have to sacrifice in order to keep Rose and Seth’s characters together in the same place.
Stoller: Her character was supposed to be the right girl that he ends up with in first season, and fortunately, she wasn’t on screen a ton in the first season, so you didn’t really know much about her, but we did kind of reconceive the character.
Delbanco: When we were like, “We’re gonna have to split them up,” we thought, “Well, then let’s fill in the blanks in such a way that she and Will might not be a great match for each other.”
There’s so many reasons that they don’t fit, which makes it harder for Will to point out the reason why it’s not working.
Delbanco: The show, obviously, is pretty breezy and light, but we do try to make it as real as we can, and we really wanted to not turn his fiancée into a villain, or someone who would be really easy for him to cast aside, because we just don’t feel like that reflects the reality of life — there is a very difficult gray zone, I think, in a lot of relationships, where it’s like, it works, so there’s not really a reason to torpedo it, but does it work well enough to really know for sure that this is what you want the rest of your life to look like? We see it with friends, and we all know it, and our families and etc., where there’s nothing quite wrong enough to end it, but is it like right enough to make it forever? What if something better doesn’t come along?
Where does that feeling leave Sylvia as Will’s friend?
Delbanco: I feel like it is a legitimate question in my own life, often: how honest are you supposed to be with your friends? You turn to your friends for their honest feelings and opinions and their understanding of the spot you’re in, and on the other hand, you’re not inside anybody’s marriage or relationship except your own. And it’s a lot to come down hard with some sense of clarity of like, “You guys don’t belong together.” Obviously, in situations that are abusive or extreme, you do, but when you are not, it’s hard to know when do you hold your tongue? When do you get involved?
Will’s not the only one who goes through some struggles in his relationship. How did you want Sylvia to be tested by having Charlie go through his own struggles?
Stoller: Sylvia wrongly assumes that her life is static and won’t change because she’s married and has kids, and Will’s life is always changing, and he’s always with a new person, and he’s single and his job is always changing. He lives in chaos, and she’s like, “I’m married and everything’s perfect in my life, and so nothing will change.” And that’s just not true about life. Life keeps changing. It’s like one of the wonderful and terrifying things about life. We wanted to play around with what happened if the central dynamic of her marriage just somewhat suddenly flipped, and suddenly this husband, who, for their entire marriage has been kind of the rock is suddenly plunged into a crisis.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
“Platonic” Seasons 1 and 2 are now streaming on Apple TV+.
