SEAS0N 02 SYN0PSIS
In the central throughline, we follow Alex’s remarkably inept attempt to to pull himself out of an existential crisis by making a feature film about “the meaning of life” for their unborn son -- a self-indulgent project that has drained their savings and monopolized his time and energy at the expense of providing any form of attention to his pregnant wife, who drifts further away from him in the process while her own artistic dream of becoming a best-selling novelist begins to feel more like a frivolous fantasy.
Along the way, we meet the wildly eccentric and deeply damaged people Alex has enlisted for his film project, each of whom is also on their own seemingly doomed quest for self-actualization in our dehumanizing age of social media influencers and impending artificial general intelligence.
Over the course of the season we follow the turbulent, intertwined lives of these these characters as they increasingly lose control of their narratives to mystifying, technologically advanced external forces that ultimately seem to have a common origin -- with the season ending on a stunning cliffhanger that will have viewers eagerly awaiting Season 3.
An origin story occurring in the weeks leading up to Season 1, Season 2 reveals the rapid unraveling of both Jodi and her husband Alex’s life aspirations that has pushed their marriage to the brink of collapse and motivated her to seek the emotional support that Ryan offers.
NEW CHARACTERS
KAYLA & PAUL
KAYLA is a remarkably nerdy, self-defeating singer / songwriter searching in vain for the lucky break that will rescue her from her dead-end job as a barista in an incredibly untrendy coffee shop. She has become involved in a burgeoning love affair with PAUL, a brilliant, possibly psychotic genetic engineer and part-time screenwriter who his lifelong frenemy, Alex, has enlisted to help him make his dying cinematic masterpiece. Their geeky nerouses seem to mesh, although Kayla has some concerns over Paul’s assertion that he is being hunted by a Chinese cabal and on the verge of completing a CRISPR-based DNA-editing algorithm that would make humans immortal.
MICHAEL & CHELSEA
CHELSEA is an aggressive, sexually adventurous supernova deeply involved with MICHAEL, an easy-going, passive, straight-arrow, who is co-starring with her in Alex’s self-aggrandizing, ill-fated “clusterf*ck”. She continually tries to coerce and manipulate Michael into becoming more like his film character – the supremely confident, sexually dominant man of her dreams. Their relationship is pushed further to the breaking point by the comically chaotic work environment engendered by Alex and Paul’s death struggle over control of the film’s storyline.