Amy Schumer’s ‘Life & Beth’ Isn’t a Trainwreck, But It’s Not Far Off

As the title implied, the first season of Amy Schumer’s semi-autobiographical Hulu dramedy series Life & Beth began with a death and ended with a spiritual rebirth. Following the sudden loss of her mother, Beth (Schumer)—an aimless wine merchant in her late thirties stuck in a committed relationship with a dopey co-worker—reevaluates her seemingly ideal urban life. She breaks up with her partner, moves out of Manhattan and back to her hometown of Long Island, and mentally revisits stories from her traumatic childhood, told via flashbacks featuring a teenaged Beth (Violet Young). Painful encounters with bullies and boys are juxtaposed with scenes from her parents’ rocky relationship and eventual divorce, all inspired by Schumer’s own childhood.

Over the course of the season’s first 10 episodes, Beth slowly but surely learns one of the most valuable coming-of-age lessons: that parents are people with their own flaws and baggage, and though they might never change, it’s possible to love them in spite of the damage they caused. (Only in death can Beth forgive her mother for her boundary-less, post-divorce dating history, which ultimately cost her a childhood best friend.) Amidst her grief, she learns to reconnect with old friends and also quickly falls for forthright, compassionate farmer John (Michael Cera), who helps her to (literally) reconnect with her roots by teaching her the ins and outs of cultivation.

While Schumer’s personal involvement with the material gives the flashbacks in Life & Beth the patina of a well-defined memory piece, complete with plainly authentic characterizations and period detail, the series too often implies a neat causal relationship between childhood incident and adult behavior. There’s also a split-personality effect between the flashbacks and present-day sequences: The former operates almost exclusively in a dramatic minor key, while the latter alternate between that and exaggerated comedy. Sometimes the tonal shifts complement each other, or at least aren’t conspicuous. Other times, it feels like two different shows stitched together.

Life & Beth returns to Hulu on Feb. 16 for a second season that unfortunately carries over these first-season issues, albeit with a different focus. The new season fleshes out Beth and John’s relationship and the show’s large supporting cast, who all previously played second or third fiddle to Beth’s inner journey. Befitting the season’s “more is better” approach, Life & Beth also features many returning faces from the first season, including David Byrne as Beth’s doctor, while packing in a number of new guest spots. Amy Sedaris, Jennifer Coolidge, and Jemima Kirke are but the tip of the famous-face iceberg.

As Beth and John’s relationship quickly progresses from serious dating to a quick New Orleans marriage to impending parenthood—a believably speedy development, given their ages and respective stages in life—John’s previously blunt personality gives way to larger communication issues as they both discover that he lives with autism spectrum disorder. (This mirrors the experiences of Schumer’s real-life husband, Chris Fischer, who also lives with ASD.) Life & Beth also provides John with a cursory origin story by incorporating flashbacks from his lonely childhood alongside an endlessly supportive and loving mother who died too young and a taciturn father whose criticisms affected his self-esteem well into adulthood.

Much like last season’s flashbacks, the scenes of younger Beth, and sometimes younger John, have a nice short story quality to them, and Young captures the brave face that adolescents wear to hide torrents of pain. These scenes are sympathetic and occasionally devastating, but they’re still orderly and utilitarian to a fault. As much as Life & Beth tries to let them stand alone or merely hint at possible fallout, they inevitably serve as explanations for why Beth has trouble trusting men or why John feels stifled when he senses someone doesn’t believe in him. Strong performances make these stretches go down smoothly, but they still resemble something from a different show.

Meanwhile, Beth’s coterie of girlfriends all acquire a sliver of the show’s attention for individual struggles. Maya (Yamaneika Saunders), Beth’s best friend, chafes against Beth’s divided attention and the group’s general inability to acknowledge her feelings of isolation as a Black woman moving through white spaces. Jess (Sas Goldberg) embarks on an affair with a much younger man. Jen (Arielle Siegel) develops an addiction to painkillers. It’s not that Life & Beth treats these stories with indifference, it’s that their secondary consideration limits the audience’s emotional investment. It also doesn’t help that the actors are required to be wacky and amplified or serious and heartfelt depending on what a particular scene dictates.

The show’s finest coup involves Beth’s sister, Ann (Susannah Flood), a prickly, depressed, agoraphobe clearly suffering in silence but unwilling to accept help from anyone, let alone her sister. Ann only appears sporadically throughout the season, but she makes an impact every time she’s on screen. Life & Beth admirably refuses to provide clear-cut psychological answers for her emotional distress beyond what Flood’s hostile, alienating performance suggests. (Similarly, Lily Fisher’s turn as a younger version of the character in the flashbacks also hints at so much misplaced hurt.) Because Ann exists on the sidelines of Beth’s story, neither she nor the audience are provided a granular look at her psyche, which makes her actions all the more compelling. Her final moment in the season carries an emotional weight otherwise absent from the series.

Life & Beth mostly hinges on Schumer’s appealing performance, which will remain endearing to anyone with fond memories of her mid-2010s comedic reign (provided that they can look past some of her inflammatory remarks regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past few months, or any number of the controversies that have dogged her career.) Her chemistry with Cera, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. As Beth and John’s relationship takes center stage, it sometimes feels like different versions of the two characters arise whenever the couple needs to be on the same page or at odds with each other. The show clearly wants to explore a relationship’s evolving complications and ugly shades, but it does so inconsistently.

Maybe John became a less compelling character when he evolved from an escapist fantasy archetype into a person with a diagnosable sensibility. (But isn’t that all relationships?) Or maybe the first season fully developed Beth’s characterization so that there isn’t much more to explore in the second, despite all the obvious external changes like marriage and pregnancy. Life & Beth generates periodic laughs and some genuine drama, but its center remains frustratingly uneven. Like Beth herself, it probably could use a reset.