I honestly thought this was going to be crazier than what it ended up being, but there’s a ton of spoilers involved in talking about that situation, so if you haven’t seen it yet and you’re in the mood to really ruin your mood, watch the 8 episodes first, then come back and talk it over here.
Spoilers:
What I thought was going to be a murder mystery of some sort ended up being a story about how being a “capital A” Adult is super hard, there’s really no safety in marriage, and we’re all horribly broken people that are ultimately going to die alone and unloved. The story itself is about a married couple with two kids going through a divorce, the wife abandons the entire family, and the father tries to deal with rebuilding his self worth and raising his kids. The entire thing is framed from his POV, but it turns out that the wife didn’t really just ghost the entire family, and she wasn’t murdered or kidnapped or anything as Hollywood like that, no she had a mental break after the divorce and ended up roaming the streets without knowing where she she was going or what she was doing. There’s a long, sad story of how she got to that place, but it’s all presented, then casually dismissed within the last two episodes, one of which was mostly about the character that Lizzy Caplan plays, which really hammers home the futility of looking for fulfillment in Adulthood.
The series on a whole is well done, the acting is top notch, but the message I took from it is frustrating because it’s something that I’m sure anyone without a large extended family already knows, and it’s depressing to be reminded that our society does not look after the people having issues.
