A fish swims in murky water as a teen girl struggles to come to the surface. Someone above yells, “Beth!” while a montage of her life flashes before her eyes. As the montage culminates, a quick cut introduces us to a grown-up Beth (Amy Schumer). The camera pulls back from a tight close-up on her face as she delivers an eloquent speech about life, only to reveal a stilted Beth is selling wine to a couple of yuppie restaurant owners. How did this teen girl grow into this dissatisfied woman? The ramifications of this incident in young Beth’s life and what led to it make up the bulk of Schumer’s slightly overstuffed 10-episode Hulu series “Life & Beth.” Schumer’s half-hour dramedy works best when it sticks to the autobiographical details that made up her book “The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo.” The further the series strays into pure fiction, the less insightful and impactful it becomes.
After this opening scene we quickly learn about Beth’s partner (she’s embarrassed to say boyfriend), Matt (a hilariously over the top Kevin Kane, “Inside Amy Schumer”), who sells champagne at the same wine company, Kerig Cellars; not to be confused with the single-use coffee company with a similar name, a running gag throughout the show. Their relationship is on the rocks, and not just because Matt has an unusually close relationship with Beth’s overbearing mother, Jane (Laura Benanti). Beth is unhappy in life, but in true midlife crisis form, isn’t quite sure what’s not quite working right in her life.
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The mother and daughter quarrel during a shopping trip when Jane reveals she’s seeing a married man. Beth’s consternation hints that this isn’t the first time, and as the series progresses it’s revealed that much of her childhood trauma comes from a similarly reckless choice her mother made. When Jane dies in a car accident later that night, it forces Beth to take stock of her life, her choices, and everything that has led her to the static existence she now leads.
As Beth’s mother, Benanti makes a few more appearances in flashbacks, fully making the most of her brief screen time. She’s a flibbertigibbet, equally as caring as she is selfish. Through these same flashbacks, it’s revealed that when Beth’s father, Leonard (Michael Rapaport), lost his baby furniture business their lives were upended. From losing their two-story house to eventually the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, teenage Beth (Violet Young) desperately tried to shield her little sister, Ann (Lily Fisher), from the worst of it.
Young is fantastic as teenage Beth, oscillating between protective big sister and vulnerable teen. Much of her performance is in the way she observes and reacts. Her expressive eyes filled with layers of sadness, from her first heartbreak to discovering her mother’s indiscretions. Schumer is less successful in this same mode. Often what should come across as pathos reads as blank. Whatever promise she showed in “The Humans” last year doesn’t come across here.
She is at her best in scenes where she can tap into broader emotions, as when she learns Matt has not been paying their rent for the weeks she’s been living back on Long Island in the wake of her mother’s death. Playing opposite Kane’s coked-up energy, Schumer’s anger is full of righteous fury. Unfortunately, these scenes are few and far between.
Moving back to Long Island after her mother’s funeral, Beth forms a crush on a farmer named John (Michael Cera, “Arrested Development”) who works at a local vineyard. While Cera has an undeniably charming screen presence, he plays John in a liminal space between a jerk and someone on the spectrum, but it’s never made very clear. They have an easy chemistry together, but again, Schumer’s limited emotional range puts a damper on the whole plot line.
Aside from a few celebrity cameos like drag king Murray Hill as Beth’s boss, David Byrne as her doctor, and Hank Azaria as the head of the funeral home, most of the supporting characters are poorly drawn caricatures. Her co-workers are overgrown children obsessed with Disney and office gossip. Her friends from Long Island are all desperate housewives or unsophisticated local yokels. An apparent life-shattering split from her best friend Liz when she was a teenager is robbed of the emotional heft it should have because both teen Liz (Grace Power) and adult Liz are barely given any screen time. The ensemble would be greatly improved with fewer characters and more character development.
Mining your life for art can be a rich exercise, but unfortunately with “Life & Beth,” Schumer tries to do too much, too fast. On top of coming to terms with her relationship with her mother (“No one loves you like your mom, and no one hurts you like your mom,” Beth eventually realizes), the show also tries to thread in a myriad of other relationships in her life that need work. Schumer explores her distant relationship with Judaism, her uneven relationship with her sister Ann (Susannah Flood), her romantic relationships with Matt and John, and lastly her estranged father Leonard. Each one of these threads could make for their own show, but in juggling them all in one season they’re all short-changed.
“Life & Beth” is clearly a very personal story for Schumer, but by shifting between workplace comedy, rom-com, and late-coming-of-age dramedy, it never quite focuses on how it wants to be what it wants to be. Despite its unfocused format, it is compulsively watchable and there is an offbeat charm to the whole thing that is hard to resist. With the resolutions found in the season finale, there is definitely room to grow for a sharper second season, but as a standalone, it hasn’t quite come into its own yet. [B-]
“Life & Beth” arrives on Hulu on March 18.