Togetherness: Season 1 (2015)

Over the past couple of years in television, there’s been a movement away from dark, brooding, solitary protagonists towards more collective, provisional and flexible ways of surviving, and being close to other people. Like Transparent, Togetherness fixes upon the Los Angeles sprawl as the right backdrop for that moment, unfolding an extended family drama that may not be quite as diasporic as Transparent, but is even more ambient and dispersed in other ways. Written and directed by Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass and Steve Zissis – with a guest directorial spot by Nicole Holofcener, who channels the late romcom L.A. of Enough Said – it’s about a couple who are starting to disperse, played by Mark Duplass and Melanie Lynskey, and a couple who are starting to emerge, played by Steve Zissis and Amanda Peet (Jay Duplass doesn’t appear, although his performance in Transparent feels very much part of the same world). Although there are narrative hooks and concrete conflicts, a great deal of the series involves these two couples trying to put the right brand of ambience between them – Duplass plays a Foley artist – with the result that their interactions are often absorbed into the emergent ambience of the city in quite evocative and cinematic ways. On top of that, as the series progresses, each episode feels more and more dissociated from what has come before, if never completely separate, putting us in the weird, fluid zone between serial and anthology attachment that seems to characterise so much television at the moment. At one level, that makes for something like a series of perfect, twenty-minute mumblecore films, not least because there was always something vaguely serial about the mumblecore movement, a sense that you’d seen all these characters and situations before, if only because the community of actors involved was so small-scale, and so continuous with the characters they played. By the same token, there was always an impulse to self-annihilation, or at least endless minorisation, at the heart of mumblecore, which actually makes it feel as if a twenty-minute slot is the ideal time for a mumblecore outing. Yet at the same time there’s a fragile, upbeat sense of solidarity and community to Togetherness that’s quite distinct from the depressive, downbeat slump of mumblecore as well, a sense of curious, collective possibility that’s very much of its televisual moment. Perhaps the real loneliness of mumblecore films was their inability to commune with each other as provisionally and flexibly as they seem to here, or perhaps they were waiting for this new and strangely optimistic L.A. to emerge – but for whatever reason, Togetherness feels like one of the few artifacts that can genuinely be called post-mumblecore, a touching and unexpected successor to a movement that seemed determined to leave no trace of survival whatsoever.