The Complicated Women of ‘Please Like Me’

Josh Thomas’s Please Like Me is close to winding up its second season in the US on Pivot. It is produced in Australia, where Thomas is a well-known stand-up comedian. Please Like Me is trying to be a different kind of “reality” television. Although the series is fictional and tightly scripted (by Thomas, co-star Thomas Ward, Hannah Gadsby, and Liz Doran) Thomas plays a character very like himself, an out gay man named “Josh” who has a straight-guy, best friend named Tom (played by Thomas’s best friend since childhood Thomas Ward) and a dog named John (played by Thomas’s dog, John). This realism seeps into the portrayal of women characters. They’re not the fantasy women  straight men put in their shows, nor are they the evil matriarchs of some popular cable series who seem more a manifestation of show creators working out their issues with their own mothers than portraits of women any of us have known.

Josh’s Mum, Rose (Debra Lawrance), tried to kill herself at the beginning of  Season 1 (in a sequence that Thomas says was very much like when his own mother attempted suicide; some of these scenes, like the rest of the series are unexpectedly, deeply funny): the impetus for Josh to move back home. In last season’s final episode, she’d vomited up a half-hearted attempted overdose (following the funeral for her live-in mother-surrogate, Aunty Peg– Judi Farr) and when Josh discovered her, disoriented and partially undressed on the kitchen floor, she begged him not to hospitalize her. He reluctantly went along with her wishes. The last lines showed a touching camaraderie between the two. “How did you lose your skirt?” he asks.

She tells him she doesn’t remember but “I made sure to put on some underwear before you came home.”

“That was considerate of you,” he says, almost smiling.

In the second season’s first episode Rose gets a puppy and a makeover and can’t stop talking; at the end she announces the to the rest of the characters that she has stopped taking her medication. In the next episode she is at a “mental home” (as most of the characters call the private hospital), the place she had always wanted to avoid in the first season. She’s not happy there and uses her new roommate Ginger’s (Denise Drysdale) attempted suicide to slip out and visit Josh during a cookout he and his housemates are throwing. He brings her back and she has stayed at the “home” for most of the rest of the season except for a visit to the zoo and a camping trip with Josh.

The two go on the trip because Ginger, who became Rose’s close friend at the “home,” succeeded in killing herself while Rose (as well as fellow residents, Hannah–co-writer Hannah Gadsby–and Arnold played by Keegan Joyce) were away at the zoo. At night in the tent, Rose cries inconsolably in the sleeping bag next to Josh’s but is dry-faced as they hike during the day while she wonders aloud why Ginger didn’t tell her she wanted to kill herself–and is angry at her for succeeding. Josh is puzzled because Rose has tried repeatedly to kill herself so if anyone should understand Ginger’s actions she should.

Of her own attempts Rose asks, “Weren’t you angry?” Josh explains that he knew that she was attempting suicide because she had a mental “disorder,” so he didn’t take her actions personally. Then he tells her that after one attempt (Rose has tried to kill herself many more times than we have seen onscreen) doctors told him that they weren’t sure they had pumped her stomach in time–and if they hadn’t she would die slowly over the period of two weeks.

“I mean, you’re my mum…” he starts. When the doctors told him they had gotten the drugs out of her system in time and she would recover he states, “Then I got angry.” This show’s thoughtful treatment of suicidality (Thomas has spoken on mental health issues to members of the US Congress), both for those who try to take their own lives and those close to them  is a striking contrast to the inconsistent, gimmicky portrayal of the same subject matter on television and in recent films like The Skeleton Twins.

I cringed at first at Josh’s father’s much younger girlfriend Mae (Renee Lim) who is originally from Thailand and has a heavy accent, because I expected her to be a stereotype. But Mae’s lines (and Lim’s delivery) make her one of the wryest wits on the show–and not in the “Asians are magic” way that Josh decries in an episode to a blind date who has just come from Reiki therapy.

When Rose first tries to kill herself, Josh’s father, Alan (David Roberts), is convinced she wanted to die because of his and Rose’s divorce, which happened many years before. Mae says to Josh, who erupts in laughter, “If your father breaks up with you, you might as well just end it all, because you have known perfect love,” before she tells Alan to get over himself.

During the visit to the zoo, Mae and Alan, along with their baby daughter, Grace, tag along and when they are alone together Alan is antsy, saying he has to get back to work. Mae (who frequently looks stressed out, with messy clothes and hair, much more life-like than the blissful, neatly dressed, perfectly coiffed new mothers of American sitcoms) tells him he works too much and that she and Grace need his presence more than they need additional money. When he counters that he bought the big house they live in for them, she holds up her daughter and asks, “Have you counted how many people are in this family?”

I thought at first that the character of Niamh (Nikita Leigh-Pritchard) would be a study in misogyny. She started out last season as the bad girlfriend (or boyfriend) everyone’s bestie has had at one point: she’s completely insufferable to everyone including Tom (who is also Josh’s roommate)–but Tom can never bring himself to end the relationship. Toward the end of Season 1 Tom did end things with Niamh or rather his new girlfriend, Claire (Caitlin Stasey ) did, interrupting his waffling to tell him (in front of  Niamh!) “Oh for fuck’s sake, Tom, of course you’re choosing me.”

This season began with a five-year time lapse after the first (Lucas has explained that the series was in development for years and wanted his character to be closer to the age he is now) and Claire, we find out, has been in Germany for 12 months, for work, leaving Tom–and their relationship–behind. Tom has started to hook up with Niamh again, which Josh warns him against, not because of her personality, but because she still loves Tom. Josh tells him that after they have sex he imagines she feels very bad.” And you’re supposed to feel quite nice after sex.”

Niamh isn’t the asshole she was in Season 1, either. She’s sweeter, more vulnerable. We can see as clearly as Josh how much she cares about Tom in the ways she tries to get into his good graces. She has changed the way our own offscreen friends and acquaintances change through the years. The person who was charming and a little outrageous in the first encounter elicits eye-rolls in the 30th. The person who, in the beginning, seemed a little cold and distant becomes, with time, a close and trusted friend. We also see a hilarious glimpse of Niamh ‘s old self  when she finds out from Josh that Tom is not only seeing someone else, but has promised to be “exclusive” with this new high-school-student girlfriend, Jenny (Charlotte Nicdao), Niamh picks up Tom’s phone, calls Jenny’s number on speaker (with Tom and Josh in the room) and informs her she and Tom had sex the night before. Before Tom can explain himself Niamh tosses the phone in a flower vase full of water.  Later when she talks with Josh (who still doesn’t really like her, even though he feels bad for her) we see that she is heartbroken–and there’s no one there to comfort her.

Tom is both “such a nice boy” (as Rose calls him after he rolls a joint for the camping trip) and emotionally cloddish–in a way that is rare for straight young men on television but not for those in life. He’s genuinely sorry he cheated on and hurt Jenny, but didn’t hesitate to have sex with Niamh, as if he couldn’t have foreseen Jenny might be affected. He doesn’t understand, until she tells him, that Claire had left the country to work in Germany because their relationship wasn’t working–and is despondent at this news.

Josh’s love interests on the show are also more complex than those that populate series created by straight men. Instead of wish-fulfillment cheerleader-model types we get…male model types, but each deeply flawed in ways that sitcom creators rarely make “the girlfriend”. Season 1’s Geoffrey, though he looked like a Greek god, could barely hold a conversation with Josh. Patrick, Josh’s roommate this season, told him he enjoyed hanging out and even making out with him, but didn’t want to have sex. Arnold spends time in the same “mental home” as Rose does.

I’m happy more women are getting the chance to create more television, but I’m eager for one to be able to create a series with Please Like Me’s combination of autobiography, serious issues and comedy–not to mention its expert touch with queer characters. I can’t wait for the day an openly queer woman, playing a role she wrote, based on her own life, kisses a woman on her TV show with the pure pleasure that Thomas radiates whenever he kisses one of his male co-stars.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DODdqLFfzsc”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender. She is hosting a reading in NYC at Henrietta Hudson on Sat., Oct. 11. Go to the Facebook invite for more info.