Togetherness: The Complete First Season

Touchy-feely title aside, the HBO series Togetherness—created by filmmaker siblings Jay and Mark Duplass, with longtime Duplass acting company regular Steve Zissis—is a solid comedy about the frustrations of love and the difficulty of sustaining relationships in the modern world. Mark Duplass and Melanie Lynskey play Brett and Michelle, a married couple with two children, whose home is suddenly overrun when Brett's best friend, Alex (Zissis), an unemployed actor, and Michelle's older sister, Tina (Amanda Peet), who has impulsively moved to Los Angeles from Texas after a bad breakup, arrive at the same time. While Brett and Michelle struggle with marriage malaise—Brett, a sound engineer for indie films, hates his job and finds family life a chore, while Michelle is bored as a stay-at-home mom who feels that life has passed her by—Tina appoints herself as a makeover guru to sad sack Alex and he falls hard for the energetic, sexy, but also manipulative gal. In other shows, the married couple's love and commitment would help them weather their disappointments, and the middle-aged male schlub would win over the hot chick, but Togetherness is smarter and more realistic than that, exploring personal disappointment, professional frustrations, uneasy compromises, unhappiness, and bad decisions made out of desperation, all with a sharp sense of humor. Compiling all eight episodes from the 2015 first season, extras include behind-the-scene featurettes, cast interviews, and deleted scenes. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)