Television
What’s fame without family and friends?
HBO Max
This article contains spoilers for the series finale of The Other Two, “Brooke & Cary & Curtis & Lance.”
The critically acclaimed series ended with the oldest son of a three-child family gazing out at the water off New York and contemplating whether he had allowed the heedless pursuit of success to destroy everything in his life that might have once been good. But this eldest boy wasn’t Kendall Roy from Succession: It was Cary Dubek, the aspiring actor turned fame monster at the heart of The Other Two. Like its prestige HBO sibling, the Max series chronicles its characters’ desperate drive to succeed at all costs, sending up along the way the values of a culture in which nothing else matters. But where the Roy family inhabits a social stratum so elite it might as well be Mars, The Other Two takes place in a world that, for all its absurdist, 30 Rock–esque flourishes, is very much our own, with characters who can feel uncomfortably close to home.
Created by former Saturday Night Live head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, The Other Two has grown steadily more outlandish over the course of its three seasons, as Cary (Drew Tarver) and his older sister Brooke (Heléne Yorke) come closer to realizing their show business fantasies. In the first season, Cary and Brooke try to sneak onto the red carpet at a movie premiere after their much younger brother, Chase (Case Walker), becomes a viral tween singing sensation. In the third and final season, Brooke, who is now a successful talent manager, goes to a high-profile party at which people who aren’t “in the industry” are literally invisible. (One civilian guest is able to rectify the situation by recounting the time she slept with Emile Hirsch.) Instead of trying to boost his social media profile by hanging out with a group of Instagays like he once did, Cary—who has booked a role in a massive Netflix hit—dons a diaper so he can drive all night and arrive just in time to “win” his high school reunion. Much of this escalation is simply the mark of a show finding its voice, but there’s also a clear arc to the evolution: The more rich and famous Brooke and Cary become, the more insane their world becomes, and the more willingly they embrace that insanity.
The more rich and famous Brooke and Cary become, the more insane their world becomes, and the more willingly they embrace that insanity.
That fame, and its accompanying absurdity, has not come without its darker moments. This season featured a nasty blowout between Brooke and her on-again, off-again boyfriend Lance, a guileless himbo who gave up a career in designing high-fashion sneakers to work as a nurse during the pandemic. Lance started the series as a one-note joke, but over time—and thanks to the inventive warmth of Josh Segarra’s performance, which turned the words hell yeah into an indelible catchphrase—he’s become the closest thing The Other Two has to an actual good person, one whose mere existence makes the endlessly venal Brooke feel shamed by comparison. Lance is so at ease with who he is that he seems impossible to rile, but once Brooke picks a fight with him, he lets her have it, unleashing years of frustration about trying to be a partner for someone whose need for validation can never be filled by a single person.
Meanwhile, Cary, in his bid to do something good for the gay community—or, rather, to be seen as doing good—torches his relationships with his real gay friends, especially Brandon Scott Jones’ sweet-tempered Curtis, who has been with Cary since the show’s first episode. Curtis has mostly been a sidekick up to this point, a striver who’s always a step or two behind his friend. (When Cary gets too busy to host the online gossip segment The Gay Minute, Curtis takes over.) But after Curtis books a role that Cary also went out for, it’s painfully clear—not least to Curtis himself—that Cary wants the project to fail. “I’m 35 years old, and I want good friends in my life,” Curtis tells him. “And I have good friends in my life, and I don’t think you’re one of them now.”
Like the Roys, Brooke and Cary are close to getting everything they’ve ever wanted, and getting there almost destroys them. Cary has gone from small roles in straight-to-streaming movies to potential Oscar winners, and Brooke, who is determined to prove that she can be as good a person as Lance, stages a mental health telethon that ends up winning a Peabody—and they’re both alone and miserable. But they have something the Roys never did: a healthy family. The show began with Brooke and Cary’s envy of Chase’s overnight success, compounded by the fact that their mother Pat (Molly Shannon) also became a massive daytime talk-show star. But as frustrated as they were with their own lot, Brooke and Cary never resented their mother and brother’s success; they just wanted some of their own.
On Succession, money and power are a substitute for the love the Roy children never got from their father, even though they can never fill the hole left by a lifetime of his abuse and neglect. The Dubeks have a childhood trauma of their own—their alcoholic father froze to death on their roof when they were kids—but the show never frames that as the reason for their ambition (nor is it even that special; when Chase accidentally reveals his family’s dark secret in front of a group of fans, one responds, “My dad froze too”). You don’t have to be broken to want to be famous; you just have to live in a world where fame is the only thing that really matters.
In the Season 3 finale, “Brooke & Cary & Curtis & Lance,” Brooke and Cary finally realize how low their drive to succeed has brought them, and they actually have the clarity to do something about it. Cary drops out of his Oscar-bait project, and Brooke sacrifices her do-gooder image on live TV to save Pat and Chase from potential career ruin. They drag themselves back to the people they’ve hurt the most, and they’re at least provisionally forgiven—not because what they did wasn’t horrible, but because, as exceptionally awful as they seem at that moment, they’re not so different from anyone else. Cary fumbles while trying to explain to Curtis how he could have gone so far astray, and Curtis effortlessly completes his thought: “You wanted to be the most famous actor in the world so everyone would love you and be impressed by you but also scared of you, and then never judge you in any way because they were too constantly in awe of you. It’s what we all wanted.” Brooke apologizes for suspecting that genial, self-effacing Lance, who made the cover of People as one of the country’s sexiest nurses, must have hired a publicist to nab the spot, but Lance admits she was right all along. “Being a nurse is great,” he tells her, “but it’s also fucking hard and dark and sometimes hella boring, like I watch somebody die every day and have so much paperwork. So I just wanted something for myself.”
Perhaps there’s something glib about this everybody-does-it stance towards toxic narcissism, especially given that The Other Two was reportedly canceled in the wake of allegations that Kelly and Schneider ran a notoriously abusive set. (An internal investigation by the show’s production company cleared them of wrongdoing, and the last episode plays as if it was always intended as a series finale.) But it feels more honest, even generous, than it does self-justifying. Sure, Cary and Brooke want financial comfort and the approval of their peers—but who doesn’t? Perhaps there’s a world where you can get by without either of those things, but as Pat is reminded when she goes back to small-town Ohio for her own nostalgia-saturated reunion, that world is hella boring, too. It doesn’t make you bad or broken to want the comforts of success, especially when you were raised without them, but it’s all too easy to break yourself in their pursuit, and only the people who love you the most will tell you when you’ve lost yourself along the way.
Cary ends the season, and the series, walking down by the ocean, having put his entire career on hold. He runs into a group of older gay men, one of who he recognizes from his guest spot on a long-running TV procedural, and they invite him to join the group for dinner. When Cary guested on the show, he approached it with a sense of smug superiority, as if it were his job to shake up the humdrum regularity of a set where the first priority is wrapping up at 5 p.m. But maybe that’s not so bad? Perhaps you’ll never win any awards playing a judge on the 18th season of a courtroom drama, but if it lets you out in time to grill salmon on the beach, that’s a different kind of success—maybe even a better one. The Other Two mocks its final turn towards sentiment when, as Cary tells Brooke about his seaside epiphany, she breaks in to ask if he’s going to say “something sweet about the beach.” But on a show whose satire has frequently drawn blood, that one barely tries to leave a mark.
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