By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 28, 2025
The first season of Platonic was a delight, built on the same comic chemistry between Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne that made the Neighbors movies so successful. It was, at times, riotously funny (the sequence of Rose Byrne’s character on ketamine may have been the funniest of 2023). Likewise, Seth Rogen’s irrational hatred of motorized scooters was one of the best running gags of that year.
This season, though, is leaning into a different brand of comedy—and it’s been wildly effective. Sometimes, a little too effective. Writer/director/showrunners Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco are pushing hard into the comedy of discomfort, to the point where I’ve had to watch certain scenes from between my fingers. This week’s episode was loaded with awkwardness, from Charlie’s (Luke Macfarlane) disastrous appearance on Jeopardy to Sylvia’s (Byrne) cringeworthy attempts to book a trendy office party venue, to Will (Rogen) and Charlie’s botched break-in at a Jeopardy producer’s home to convince him to erase Charlie’s episode.
The whole season has been packed with these hide-under-the-bed moments: Will accidentally driving a golf ball into the eye socket of his fiancée’s father, bursting his eyeball, and then trying to call off a wedding with the woman whose father he just blinded. Or the first episode’s chaos, when Will and Sylvia tried to keep guests from drinking a tab of acid one of Will’s friends had dropped into a champagne glass—only for Will to sneak away from his own engagement party for hours to buy more champagne, which then shattered in the back of his Jeep.
There was nearly an entire episode devoted to a couples’ dinner between Will and his fiancée Jenna (Rachel Rosenbloom) and Sylvia and Charlie that was 15 minutes of pure conversational agony. And Rogen’s character keeps blurting things to Sylvia just loud enough that I’m terrified Jenna will overhear.
The whole season has made my soul recoil. This week’s episode even managed to use Kyle Mooney in the only way he should ever be used: to annoy the hell out of Will in hopes of making him quit his job. And that’s the thing—the first season made us care about these characters, which makes it even harder to watch them make the worst possible choices over and over again. The second season of Platonic feels like the WatchPeopleDieInside subreddit come to life.
And somehow, it’s all made worse by Seth Rogen’s wardrobe. He’s sporting a terrible mullet, often hidden under equally terrible hats, and dresses like a middle-aged guy clinging desperately to his 20s. He wore a pink shorts suit to his engagement party, people!
What the hell is with this hat?
Or this one?
Why is he wearing three gift-wrap bows to his wedding?
Who is dressing this character, and why do they hate him so much?
Don’t get me wrong. It works. It’s horrendous in exactly the right way. I can’t think of another example where a wardrobe this hideous plays so perfectly into the comedy of discomfort. The man tucks his bad t-shirts into his shorts! I don’t know much about fashion, but I know enough to appreciate the horror show that is Seth Rogen’s wardrobe. And I didn’t even mention the banana phone!
Well done, Stoller, Delbanco, and Rogen.