But within a couple of years, she started booking TV gigs and became a finalist on Last Comic Standing. In college, Schumer was a theater major, and didn’t start actively performing standup until later. In the early episodes, when relations between the sisters are at their most strained, Ann mostly appears on the other end of phone calls with Beth, but Flood manages to steal those scenes anyway. The biggest revelation of the cast is Susannah Flood, who plays Beth’s younger sister Ann. And John and Beth’s awkward chemistry and stumbling romantic entanglement imbues the later episodes with genuine warmth. In one of the show’s best running gags, John doesn’t know how to lower his voice to a whisper when he’s saying something the whole room isn’t meant to hear. And his innate vulnerability feels novel in the context of an outdoorsy character who’s a little uninhibited and bad at communicating. Even bearded and in his mid-thirties, Cera has an essential boyishness far beyond the fact that we’ve been watching him onscreen since he was a teenager. Michael Cera plays against type as John, a farmhand at a vineyard, whose shirt is splattered with animal blood when Beth meets him in the third episode. Both shows hit similar story beats, with their protagonists moving back to their hometowns, mourning a family member, and dealing with a parent’s alcoholism. In fact, Life & Beth would make a good companion piece to Somebody Somewhere, the recent HBO Max series starring Schumer’s friend and frequent opening act Bridget Everett. While the stand-up comics of yesteryear often starred in bright network sitcoms with laugh tracks, comedians of Schumer’s generation make gritty, semi-autobiographical streaming comedies about complicated family dynamics and romantic dysfunction like Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi or Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. If that doesn’t sound like a ton of laughs, well, Life & Beth is categorically a comedy with its half-hour episodes, but in practice it’s more of a dramedy. (I came up in downtown New York theater, which is still where I live and breathe.The Pitch: The upcoming Hulu series Life & Beth stars creator Amy Schumer as the titular Beth, a sales rep for a wine distributor who is, in her own words, “barreling toward 40.” Over the course of the first season’s 10 episodes, four of which were directed by Schumer, Beth experiences upheaval in pretty much every area of her life: a death in the family, a breakup, a move, a career change, and a health scare. Bonus Fact: For The People is my first time on TV as anything more than a guest star, so the circumstance of having a new job that intimidates you and inspires you, like Kate does, was pretty easy to get behind while we shot this whole first season. Kate Littlejohn loves old movies and so do I (my favorite is “It’s A Wonderful Life”) but for plain fun I’m a die-hard RuPaul’s Drag Race fan. Kate DOES NOT like mayonnaise and neither do I. Kate Littlejohn knows all the words to “Anaconda” and so do I. I’m still, even three months after wrapping, so identified with Kate Littlejohn in my mind that at first I mistook this article to be ten fun facts about her, not me, and it was almost an identical list, for example… I did not make a lot of friends during that time.Ĭlick inside to read the rest of the fun facts… Also like Kate, I’m an over-achiever, so the lowest grade I ever got was a B+ (in Physics), was on the Dean’s List 7 out of 8 semesters, wrote an honors thesis (called “Narrative Pathology and the Structure of Regret) and graduated summa cum laude. Like Kate, I went to a state school and I’m proud of it (UC Berkeley – Go Bears). I was on the Lightweight Women’s Crew Team in college. You might recognize Susannah from her work on Chicago Fire or for her stage roles, including Broadway’s The Cherry Orchard. Susannah Flood is the scene-stealing newcomer on the new Shondaland series For The People and we learned more about her for a 10 Fun Facts feature!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |