The last 15 years have been a golden era of TV, minting generational treasures out of Cold War-era Russian spies posing as an American nuclear family (The Americans), a Black family fighting for their family legacy through protecting their land (Queen Sugar), a talking horse that swears (BoJack Horseman), and a surreal trip through the mecca of Black cool (Atlanta). But, somewhere along the prestige TV path, humor went from straightforward absurdism that anyone can laugh at to overly intellectualized comedic vehicle to make drama more palatable. We stopped laughing out loud, and started laughing in our heads.
That’s why we need more shows like Peacock’s hilariously self-contained comedy Laid.
For eight 30-minute episodes, Ruby Yao (Stephanie Hsu) and her true-crime-obsessed best friend AJ (Zosia Mamet) trace every person Ruby had slept with after discovering that all of her sexual partners are dying in the order of when they had sex with her. In search of a way to stop the murders, the perpetually phenomenal Hsu tries to circumvent the curse with over-the-jeans dry humping, remembers her covid-era safe sex romp that had her and Search Party’s John Early trying to dirty talk through N95 masks, and tells her former throuple with Simu Liu that they could die soon.
Laid doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does steamroll over any drama, flattening it into nothing more than soil from which humor can sprout. Ruby is taken to task by all of her ex-lovers over her inconsiderate actions, including drunkenly sleeping with AJ’s boyfriend and lying about it, and any deep self-examination she might engage in is promptly undercut as she makes a crude joke about her predicament. She’ll yell at an incompetent police officer about how much of a terrible person she is, then tell him she didn’t instinctively check to see if his partner was wearing a wedding ring because she instantly saw that he was gay. Laid is a laughs factory with a joke manufacturing strategy I wish other “comedies” followed.
We live in a world where an anxiety-riddled drama like The Bear, an existential deep dive into the psyche of a hitman like Barry, and an exploration into grief through the eyes of a children’s TV host like Kidding can all be nominated for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes. All three are spectacular shows, but the laughs are few and far between. Post-Breaking Bad, Hollywood has become too enamored with the relatable antihero trope, to the point that it’s found its way into nearly every genre of TV. Why can’t we just have a goofball going through absurd situations in which the only real goal is to find new ways to make the audience laugh?
Luckily, we have shows like Hacks, Abbott Elementary, and, of course, Laid, making sure we remember that even fully fleshed-out human beings can be fuckin’ hilarious all of the time.