Casual

By: Robert Murphy

Dating apps are a dime a dozen novelty in today's world where anyone can go on a website or go right on their phone to try and make a connection with somebody. It's great in many ways but it ultimately has many flaws to it as well and for recently single mother Valerie Meyers (Michaela Watkins), who simply wants to connect again with someone, it can be a bit frightening. Her eccentric brother Alex (Tommy Dewey) however is one of those excellent manipulators of today's modern technology and knows just the right moves to help her sister get out of her slump.

Meeting your significant other online has never been something to gawk at and with the advancements in today's technology it has basically become common place for most everyone. This doesn't make things any less awkward for Valerie though as she's spent the last few years in wedded matrimony, that is until her husband cheated on her with some younger prettier girl. It happens all the time in the world and on TV but Casual stands above with its three exemplary main cast members. 

Valerie is just an all around mess of a person when you first meet her and as you watch the show you get the feeling that she was like this long before her unfortunate divorce. Her relationship with her brother Alex also enters into the realm of exceedingly close, mostly due to their upbringing, but the two play well of one another. Even though Valerie is the shrink in the family Alex spends most of his time helping her and treating her like a patient while trying to get her out of her comfort zone when it comes to sex. Alex himself is a self made man after co-founding a dating website, Snooger, that he himself uses to meet woman and hook up with them. However, this doesn't prevent him from being a character with real depth  as you later find out about his struggles to actually make a dating app that works on a real level for the people who use it. He may exploit the system but he does believe in finding that special someone and he spends quite a number of episodes searching for that special someone. 

The break out star for Casual though comes from Valerie daughter Laura (Tara Lynne Barr). Her character had a dominate presence right from the get go as she was the complete opposite person to her mother. Laura is far more sexually confident than her mother is and probably could ever be, her first scene alone in the show involves sex with her boyfriend in a hot tub. Her relationship with her mother is also extremely lax, in fact all three group together in an interesting way when Alex is involved, and Laura basically runs the show when it comes to her mother showing any signs of being a parent. She still has plenty of raw emotion to bring to the role though so it is not all teenage angst, her relationship with her grandma and later on an interesting relationship with her photography teacher makes every moment she's on screen complete gold.

Episodes do have a certain odd orientation to them when you get down to it as the show never really knows who it wants to focus on. I assumed that the show would mostly center around Valerie as she tries to be a single mother and find another man in her life with the first few episodes almost play out like the first season of Cougar Town. The show however tends to hop around from Alex and his sorted love life to Laura and her teenage escapades and so on and so forth. The episodes themselves are all for the most part top notch but it gets a little messy with the follow through.

The remaining cast members is topped off by some excellent names and some relative new comers that manage to do quite well for themselves. Frances Conroy brings her odd charm to the role of Valerie and Alex's mother, Dawn, and I use that term very loosely. It seems the two's childhood was anything but normal and Dawn would rather have lived her life traveling the world and screwing strangers. Their father Charles (Fred Melamed) was just as bad as their mother and they each bring the same self important know it all attitude to their roles. Former Scrubs cast member Eliza Coupe also joins the cast for a number of episodes as Alex's "girlfriend" and the reason why that's in quotes will be extremely apparent once you finish watching her first episode, but her importance it's rather hard to overlook as you discover she is the only one Alex has genuinely connected with.

Perhaps the only character I found myself on the fence about was Alex's friend Leon (Nyasha Hatendi). His character appears in one of the first episodes as Valerie's awkward one night stand who Alex kindly makes breakfast for the following day. The two then form a begrudging friendship due Alex's lack of social graces and his need to pester the ever living daylights out of someone. Alex does do a bit of good for Leon in trying to break him out of his shell since he too has just got out of a long term relationship and needs to get out and mingle again. His shy and timid demeanor works great with Alex's but during certain episodes he just feels out of place and is only there because the script needs him to be. He does have a number of exceptional moments throughout the show, especially in the finale, but he is hit or miss for someone who appears so often in episodes. 

Casual doesn't shy away from hard hitting topics or it's frankness towards how desensitizing it is to be a part of the online dating world. People log in, answer a few questions and are instantly connected to thousands of people who will either creep on you, send you pictures that should never be sent and much much more. It's all done in good fun and the commentary on dating that is presented here is top notch. Add to it the lead roles of Alex, Valeria and Laura and you truly have a show that takes a concept you may have seen before, but makes it their own.

Good:

- Excellent cast

- A funny commentary on online dating

- Tara Lynne Barr as Laura is exceptional

Bad:

- Episode oreinatation is all over the place

- Nyasha Hatendi is hit or miss

Scully Rating: 7.5 out of 10