Everything you need to know about Eve Fletcher (Kathryn Hahn) is crystallized in her first scene with her son, Brendan (Jackson White). It’s the night before he heads off to college, leaving this single mom alone for the first time. They’re packing up his room – well, to be more precise, she’s packing up his room, and he’s looking at his phone. She tries to get him to help, or to at least participate, and also to make some emotional investment in this very important evening for her; he demurs and condescends, and then he snaps. And then she apologizes to him. Of course.
In other words, “Mrs. Fletcher” – which debuted its first three episodes at TIFF ahead of its October 27 bow on HBO – is the story of a people pleaser who wonders what it would be like to please herself. Her story was first told in Tom Perrotta’s novel; he pens the pilot episode, which is directed by Nicole Holofcener. Both are among the executive producers, and Hahn is one of the show’s producers. That’s a healthy pedigree, even by HBO standards (Jessi Klein, whom it has become pretty clear was the actual guiding genius behind “Inside Amy Schumer,” is also an EP). Based on these three shows, “Mrs. Fletcher” is a promising series and an always-welcome showcase for the considerable gifts of Ms. Hahn, though it is thus far hampered by a structural miscalculation that may prove hard to shake.
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The best material concerns the journey of the title character, an empty nester who’s not sure where the hell she goes from here. “We’re free from our kids! We finally get to do what we want to do,” insists her friend Jane (Casey Wilson), but Brendan has been Eve’s sole focus for so long, she’s not sure what that might even entail. Maybe it finally means the pursuit of pleasure; Jane assures her that she’s “a skinny MILF goddess,” and with just that much prompting, she finds herself watching a lot of porn and trying to date. And in the inevitable empty-nester move of taking a community college course, she finds herself “classmates” with Julian (Owen Teague), the artsy kid her terrible son used to bully in high school. Eve and Julian have an… interesting chemistry.
Hahn is at a wonderful point in her career where you can cast her in just about anything, and the viewer is right there with her, from the jump. This is not an unusual character for her (specifically, attractive but mousy Woman of a Certain Age who has a late sexual awakening), but that baggage ultimately helps her establish this particular woman, and connect with the audience. And she’s not repeating herself – as Eve, she finds new notes to play and new nuances to explore.
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Jackson White fully doesn’t shy away from the basic qualities of son Brandon, who is, refreshingly, a terrible person – not your typical sullen teen who’s secretly wise or sensitive, but a snide piece of shit with few redeemable qualities. (Alarmingly few, in fact; wouldn’t any of her sensitivity or kindness have rubbed off on him?) The show’s writers, to their credit, do not go easy on him; two scenes in and you’re ready to punch him in the face. But the problem is, they have to sustain this character and his behavior over many episodes, and I’m not sure how long they can expect an audience to tolerate this little shit, or, more to the point (as the press materials position the series as “a dual coming-of-age story”), how long they can wait to make him remotely sympathetic. The first three episodes intercut Eve and Brendan’s lives, with roughly comparable screen time, but as long as Brendan is this much of a little shit, that ratio seems unsustainable.
There are a few other, comparatively minor issues – some of the visual motifs, for example, are a little shopworn (a nude swim as baptism is, well, not a terribly original idea) – but it’s a solid series overall, comprised of sharp, witty, unapologetically sexual scripts, crisply directed and convincingly acted. (And some of the music choices are astonishingly perfect; there’s a Liz Phair needle drop that made this viewer squeal with delight). But “Mrs. Fletcher” could find itself hobbled by a pressing structural problem: at least in these episodes, we’re spending equal time with unequally interesting characters. [B]
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