6/29/2023 0 Comments Luca padovan![]() She plays young widow Love with prickly self-assuredness, a far cry from insecure waifling Beck. While I desperately miss Hari Nef, who played Beck’s hilariously self-aggrandizing grad program rival last season, I, like Joe, soon fell head-over-heels for Pedretti (a dead ringer for fellow chill chick Kat Dennings). Witnessing the horrified self-delusion with which a predator like Joe tackles the #MeToo movement is a beautiful mind-fuck to behold. Film buff Ellie will do anything to get a leg up in the industry, including hanging out with a creepy comedian nicknamed Hendie (Chris D’Elia) who’s got a penchant for mentoring/abusing young girls that happens to mirror the grooming strategies of real-life animator John Kricfalusi. But while Paco (Luca Padovan) was small and abused, mouthy teen Ellie (Jenna Ortega, a standout performer) just thinks Joe is another Hollywood creep who wants to screw her. Once again, he can’t help but try to rescue another neighbor child, much as he was rescued by a psychotic bookstore owner when he, too, was a victimized kid. And maybe he was never all that talented a liar at all, but a predator who merely barnacled himself to gullible women. (Clearly, he can no longer get by as an Adonis in a city where Adonises are a dime a dozen.) He’s no criminal mastermind, but a criminal hardly one step ahead of his own self-destruction. (The season’s best episode centers around control-freak Joe whizzing through a nonconsensual LSD drugging.)įor a man who perennially believes himself to be smarter and slicker than every other person around him, Joe finds himself constantly foiled by the horoscope-worshipping, pseudoscience peddling hipsters surrounding him. Where Zach Cherry’s oblivious bookstore clerk Ethan was the sum total of comic relief in Season 1, now we get many more laughs from Joe’s L.A. There’s more overt levity this season, as Joe trades winding his way through Ivy League brats for winding his way through wellness-obsessed ding-dongs. (Now just keep in mind what I said about likability.) Now going by the name Will Bettelheim, he soon scores a job as a book clerk at an upscale grocery store called Anavrin (Nirvana backwards, natch) and becomes enmeshed in the lives of his co-workers, including self-involved aspiring filmmaker Forty Quinn, played by James Scully, and the dude’s twin sister, effortlessly likable chef Love, played by Victoria Pedretti. In order to escape Candace’s revenge, he absconds to the one place she’d never think to look for a vampire like him: sunny, dumby L.A. Now it’s his turn to know what it’s like to feel hunted. In other words, viewers like me.Īfter “accidentally” killing Beck in the first-season finale and framing her therapist for the murder, Joe believes he’s gotten away with it all…until another ex he left for dead (Ambyr Childers) comes a’knocking. You true believers may have glommed onto its shadowy New York City setting and Joe’s erudite mystery, but Season 2 will appeal to viewers who will love to see a snob like Joe get eaten alive by Angeleno hollowness, like a cadaver dissolving in lye. I’m sure many people who loved Season 1 will grouse at Season 2, which reboots the series to Los Angeles and delves deeper into Joe’s psyche/trauma. (Ya know, glass cages hidden in basements, soviet prison guard mentors, the world’s most brain-dead cops, etc.) ![]() The writing is self-consciously hip - though sometimes mistaking literary references for inherent intelligence - so the plot lunacies go down a bit smoother here than they would on more mind-numbing programs. You floundered on Lifetime, which recently snipped its scripted original programming in favor of a return to its women-in-peril movie brand, but the show became a sleeper hit on Netflix thanks to its binge-friendly cliff-hangers.
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