'Unstable' Is Very Close To Being Good In Season 2

By Chris Revelle | TV | August 23, 2024 |

Hey, remember Unstable, that show that premiered in the Spring of 2023 that stars Rob Lowe and his son John Owen Lowe? Where they play Ellis and Jackson Dragon, respectively? Where Ellis is a billionaire of the Dragon biotech company as well as a wacky rich handful to his much more grounded foil of a son? And where a carousel of goofy supporting characters revolves around the father/son pair and puts them through light, amiable workplace-sitcom hijinks? Perhaps you remembered it entirely and were eagerly awaiting its return. But I had mostly forgotten about it, so when I saw Unstable season 2 on Netflix, I thought oh right, that show! As I hit play on the first episode, I had some fleeting impressions of the first season that came back to me, but I realized quite quickly that it didn’t matter very much; Unstable is a featherlight affair in a very classic and recognizable sitcom mold, so I was able to tune back in without much of a hiccup.

Jackson (John Owen Lowe) joined his father Ellis’ (Rob Lowe) company Dragon after a long will-he-won’t-he in season 1. Ellis is a cartoon of a CEO, something in the mold of Ted Danson on Mr. Mayor, where the whole game of the character is to be as rich, childish, and clueless as humanly possible, a clownish example of how alienating and unreal wealth can be. Jackson is more even-keeled and wants to break out of his father’s shadow to do something original. This puts him in the path of Peter (Emmy-nominee Lamorne Morris), the CEO of a bio-battery startup called Magma, who connects with Jackson, and the two work to create the next big thing. This, of course, causes Ellis to fly off the handle and do everything he can to acquire Magma and keep Jackson within his and Dragon’s confines. The bio-battery’s development and selling form the season’s general arc with all the drama and hijinks built from it. Dragon CFO and nervous wreck Anna (Fleabag’s Sian Clifford) finds herself between many rocks and many hard places as she navigates Ellis’ manic ups and downs. There’s also her distant and adversarial relationship with her ex-stepdaughter Georgia (Iris Apatow). Their subplot is easily the most interesting and emotionally textured as we watch Georgia manipulate and bully everyone around her to seek attention from Anna. Unstable could have very well let Georgia simply be this human-shaped chaos device that creates drama, so I appreciate that the show added some depth to make the dynamic a little more layered and recognizable.

Elsewhere at Dragon, we have Ruby (Emma Pilar Ferreira) and Luna (Rachel Marsh), two characters in the brilliant-but-wacky scientist mold that recall Better Off Ted. They mainly act as Jackson’s friends group, but they get their share of sitcom friction like professional jealousy and workplace romances. There’s also Jackson’s friend Malcolm (Aaron Branch) who works as a lab manager, but mainly functions as a yes-man and eager acolyte to Ellis. The character’s whole game seems to be “I have a worshipful crush on Ellis” and as occasionally amusing as it is, it’s also very one-note. In fact, as wonderful as the supporting cast is, the material the show gives them is pretty thin and predictable. That’s a feature and not a bug of this kind of sitcom, but after a few episodes, it began to feel that we weren’t watching characters interact as much as we were watching different character games iterate themselves. Malcolm is always following Ellis with a rapt gaze, Ellis is always a heads-in-the-clouds weirdo in the middle of a tantrum, Anna is always at an 11/10 on the anxiety scale, and so on. It’s so repetitive that many of the jokes fail to break the surface and the whole experience just sort of slips past. Unstable made itself such an easy watch that it barely clings to memory aside from some lingering impressions.

It’s a real shame too because there are some great performers doing their thing on Unstable. Even though she rarely gets to do much else, Sian Clifford is an artist when it comes to anxious tics. Her eyes triple in size, her jaw clenches, and lips purse in fear or suspicion. Iris Apatow plays a pretty one-note chaos agent, but many flowers for her for finding an actual tender side to her character. The writing for her is pretty thin, so it’s impressive she invested it with some depth. I also want to shout out Lamorne Morris who is finally getting some recognition with his Emmy nomination for Fargo. Peter doesn’t have a ton of personality written into him, so it’s especially notable how much warmth and humor Morris imbues him with. Rob Lowe is doing a rich twit riff on his Chris Traeger character from Parks and Rec, which works just fine, but I wish he had found some new angle to this character. John Owen Lowe fairs a bit better, especially as Jackson takes steps to stand up for himself and become his own person. He has an interesting cadence to his line-readings and I hope we see him around in other things. I have somewhat of a soft spot for him ever since he had a decent answer to the nepo-baby question. His dad, not so much, but I’m happy that the junior Lowe seems to have his head on straight about it. There’s also a Fred Armisen character named Lesley that I haven’t mentioned because he’s pretty superfluous. It’s a stock goofball character that Armisen has played for ages. It’s competent, it goes down smoothly, and it’s more amusing than ha-ha funny; Unstable in a nutshell.

The one thing that really struck me about Unstable’s second season is how close to being good it became. It’s not that it was bad before, but it was fine. It was amusing, it was well-acted, and it was very easy to binge. The second season is all of those things, but it also takes some small steps toward having a point about the business world it portrays. Every now and again, a line or a plot point gestures at criticism of capitalism or the runaway train that is the start-up space. Sometimes, I could hear the faint echo of shows like Silicon Valley, which was unsparing in its skewering of venture-capitalist culture. Unfortunately, Unstable is not that kind of show. It’s far too in love with its characters and its world as-is that it never rocks the boat very much. It’s strange too because there’s a lot of humor to be mined by puncturing the self-importance of celebrity CEOs and their corporations and that seems a natural target for a comedy set at a bio-tech company. Instead, the show is almost self-consciously soft, seemingly too ginger in its touch to push its characters or itself into new territory. The result is a perfectly pleasant watching experience with some decent jokes and occasional emotional depth that evaporates from the mind like a dream when it’s done. Unstable is great passive viewing, but it’s so close to actually being good.