Casual

The final season of Zander Lehmann’s Hulu series illustrates everything viewers could want from a half-hour hybrid of comedy and drama. It’s ambitious without losing the ongoing narrative thread.

Watching their [Alex and Laura's] relationship deepen is a highlight. [3 Jun 2016, p.102]

Right up to the end, Casual excels at showing us what’s in parentheses. Even as it depicts big issues like death and divorce and parent-child conflict, it excels the most at showing us the less momentous elements of daily life: the bad dates you won’t remember years from now, the game nights that go awry, the road trips where someone puts the wrong type of fuel in the tank and ruins everything.

Beautifully crafted and excellently acted, Casual is well worth checking out, to see if its mood and rhythms fall in sync with yours.

The comic situations and commentary on how difficult it is to find love in the era of Twitter and texting feels organic to the three people at the center of this remarkably well-crafted and well-acted piece.

Casual is a weird show, and at first, it’s not entirely easy to go with its erratic flow.... The show is perplexing, but as evidenced by the care it shows for Laura’s fragile relationship with her father, or the siblings’ devotion to each other in the face of their egotistical, manipulative mother (Frances Conroy)--it has a poetry to it, too.

There are, admittedly, some funny lines (Valerie laments about a guy, “His favorite movie is ‘Underworld’ ”), and a bittersweet quality throughout that approximates some of Reitman’s films.... Still, the series just isn’t distinctive enough to separate itself from the pack, from the casting to the premise, in the way something like Hulu’s “Difficult People” did