Getting On: Season 2 (2014)

In some ways, not much has changed for the second season of Getting On – and that’s very much in keeping with the mood of the show, which tends to absorb and normalise crises into the destructive-creative routines that keep the Billy Barnes Extended Care Unit (almost) going. Head doctor Jenna James (Laurie Metcalfe) is still doing research on the sly while trying in vain to work on her people skills, head nurse Dawn Forchette (Alex Borstein) is still trying to figure out her relationship with supervising nurse Patsy De La Serda (Mel Rodriguez), and return-to-work nurse Didi Ortley (Niecy Nash) is still trying to stay out of the crossfire and just do her job properly. As a result, the season doesn’t develop so much as intensify the constrictions of the previous season, although that also means intensifying the flexible, provisional, improvisational arrangements that the Unit Staff adopt to elude them. In fact, the season is driven by an economic intensification more than anything, as Mount Palms Hospital starts to rationalise and downsize with greater and greater aggression, forcing the cast through a series of administrative and logistical loopholes that finally sees them breaking the surface in the final episode, coming to air in a beautiful rooftop scene that provides us with the first glimpse of Los Angeles so far, only to sink just as rapidly back into the thick of it for a harrowing conclusion. In the process, gender and sexual orientation, in particular, becomes more and more resilient in its fluidity, as Jenna’s urogenital experiments leads her to postulate that the body may naturally move towards transexuality as it ages; Jenna’s own doctor (a wonderful cameo from Mary Kay Place) develops an interest in her that might be lesbian but just as equally might not be; and Dawn and Patsy’s relationship moves further and further away from the straight-woman/repressed-gay-man archetype of, say, Arrested Development, towards something that often feels like a new sexual orientation altogether. Countering precarity with promiscuity, this emergent genderqueer lifeworld moves across the faces of the central cast with a roaming, contortive curiosity, until it feels as if everyone is continually, compulsively scanning the horizon for the next crisis, if only for the strange and unexpected liberations it might bring. Perhaps that’s why the ward feels both larger and smaller than it actually is, and the series itself feel both more agoraphobic and claustrophobic than its suite of six thirty-minute episodes. At moments it’s like watching fragments of a single movie, at other moments individual scenes have the comic or dramatic intensity of a single movie, but most of the time it’s a series that proceeds by generating its own sense of crisis-time - no longer governed by day or night, work or rest, on-shift or off-shift, but for that very reason peculiarly open to the flexible, provisional, improvisational pleasures of how, where and at what pace you watch it, as well as the particular crises you choose to bring to it.