Molly’s assistant, Nicholas (Joel Kim Booster); her cousin and hapless employee, Howard (Ron Funches); and foundation head Sofia (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez) make for far more interesting protagonists than a billionaire whose main concern is being liked.
Photo: Apple TV+
Season two of a comedy series should be a party. While season one gets stuck with the heavy lifting of world-building and character establishment, the second season is when a comedic premise becomes a joke machine: You can turn one of your leads into Jackie Daytona or have a character join the Blue Man Group, you can add a Minna or have the boss get their foot stuck in a George Foreman grill. So it’s with a heavy heart that I must admit that season two of Loot — Apple TV+’s comedy about a billionaire divorcée’s quest to give away all her money — continues to flatten Molly into a series of empty gowns Maya Rudolph works valiantly to bring to life. Rudolph simply has too little to play with as a main character: Molly is never communally loathed like Michael Scott, never feared like Selina Meyer, and rarely shows signs of the incompetence that plagued the Bluths. Instead, she’s quickly forgiven for every slight, beloved by her household staff (tell me we’re in a wealthy person’s fantasy without telling me we’re in a wealthy person’s fantasy), and can easily figure out a vacuum cleaner despite not having used one in two decades. It’s hard to understand what kind of hero’s journey Molly is having at this point. How can you redeem someone who isn’t bad?
But what’s truly painful about Loot season two are the glimpses of a better show glimmering just beneath the surface. While its driving focus is Molly’s crush on Arthur (Nat Faxon) — a corny divorced dad who is also her employee (!!) — the time that remains is littered with pieces of tragically underdeveloped plots driven by the non-profit’s office family. Molly’s assistant, Nicholas (Joel Kim Booster); her cousin and hapless employee, Howard (Ron Funches); and foundation head Sofia (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez) make for far more interesting protagonists than a billionaire whose main concern is being liked. Meanwhile, employees Rhonda (Meagan Fey) and Ainsley (Stephanie Styles) are heavily sidelined even as they remain the most consistent source of the show’s big laughs. Maybe if we still had the technology to make a 22-episode season of a comedy series, we’d have the Loot of my dreams, but alas, we live in a world built for shareholders with no taste by executives with no courage. Here, the season two plots a more ensemble-driven Loot could’ve explored.
Molly’s assistant, Nicholas, is a mean, openly gay man who worships his straight boss. We’ve seen this before. Fortunately, season two makes an effort to fill out the character behind the trope, using the details of Booster’s own life as the adopted gay Korean child of white Midwestern farmers. In episode three, we meet Nicholas’s parents, played by John Lutz and Pam Murphy in a moment of objectively perfect casting, when Molly invites them to see a racy play Nicholas is starring in because she thought he “had a good relationship” with them. (Nothing about Nicholas suggests this to be true.) Inevitably, the episode becomes about Molly trying to prove she doesn’t need Nicholas or her staff — the show spends an entire minute of screen time on a montage of her being competent at household tasks — while Nicholas’s relationship with his parents is given one brief, final scene where he invites them out to a diner. We completely skip over any examination of the tension between Nicholas and his ostensibly culturally conservative parents, as though midwestern repression is simply a matter of being reticent and not a cultural practice rooted in shame. Instead it’s suggested that everything worked out because Nicholas’s main source of unconditional support is his boss. How dark!
Episode five, “Mally’s,” is a prime example of the good-bad dichotomy of this show: We are forced to slog through a wholly uninteresting trip to the mall where Molly ends up buying the entire place just to get one over on a security guard trying to do his job. The purchase of the mall never comes up again but does remind us that, despite its entire premise, Loot has no real interest in critiquing unchecked power exercised by the ultrawealthy. Luckily, the other half of the episode finds the real fun, giving us Nicholas and Howard attempting to canvas a neighborhood populated entirely by men Nicholas has ghosted. It’s a thoughtful, funny exploration of his inner life, a moment of real growth where we get to see the source of his neuroses, and it’s an absolute delight to watch Booster and Funches play together. The only problem is that it isn’t the whole episode.
In the same way Booster’s personal lore has begun to fill out his character, so too has Ron Funches brought a key element of his personality — wrestling fan — into Howard. Arthur convinces Howard, who is looking to expand his financial portfolio, to start his own wrestling “league.” (I have never seen a wrestling promotion referred to as a league, but perhaps the writers feared confusing Tim Cook and his friends.) Arthur ends up casting Nicholas as the big bad heel character, but by the time the first show rolls around we find out that Arthur — the cousin of a billionaire who is trying to give away all her money — can’t afford the rate of out-of-work veteran Truck Harrison. Pardon my French, but this is narrative bullshit. Getting to watch Funches and Booster work and do spots together (these are wrestling terms, don’t worry about it) is a series highlight but also a frustrating reminder of how much more fun this show could be if Molly was a regular chaos agent in the lives of the ensemble and less a solo main character being hurried through a love story. What I’m saying is there could’ve been way more wrestling, and considering how great a physical comedian Maya Rudolph is, it is an actual crime that they relegated her to a confused audience member at a wrestling match.
Ainsley is this show’s Kenneth Parcell, and I mean that as the highest praise. Played with utter perfection by Stephanie Styles, she’s the most consistent source of pure joy, regularly delivering the harrowing details of her religious upbringing with the sunniest of dispositions and singing silly songs about ice cream that Howard finds threatening. Unfortunately, episode four gives precious little time to Sofia and Nicholas helping Ainsley crack the seating chart of a wedding I am furious I will never see. In improv there’s a rule: show, don’t tell. Talking about this crazy wedding full of ghoulish Ainsley-esque WASPs fighting over secret daughter-mistresses and a dilapidated family winery and not showing any of it to me? This is cruel and unusual. Again, an ensemble show could have the whole office at Ainsley’s wedding, which this show clearly has the budget to pull off on an epic scale. I don’t care about seeing more nice cars, I care about seeing Aunt Poppy!
Who is Rhonda and why does she owe someone a baby shoe? While I understand her character game is chiming in with non sequiturs, we learn nothing about her even after she’s almost killed when Molly drives a passenger van into her naked body. Even The Office’s Creed Bratton had more going on than this — give Rhonda a blog or something!
Sofia is the catalyst for the entire series, the person who initially brings Molly into the office in the pilot, so it’s always seemed odd that the show isn’t, well, about her. While Sofia very often teaches Molly the importance of their non-profit’s work, Molly mainly teaches Sofia about being selfish. It’s a missed opportunity for a show that seeks to wrestle with the concept of what it means to be good: Molly and Sofia could make excellent foils through which to examine whether achieving good outcomes is as important as living your life by good principles. There are also glimpses of a Jack Donaghy/Liz Lemon dynamic that practically writes itself; in episode two, “Clueless,” Molly pushes Sofia out of her comfort zone, encouraging her to text their architect, Isaac (O-T Fagbenle), to ask him out on a date. This escalates to Sofia storming into a bar to confront Isaac over her 40 unanswered texts, only to end up having to fake her way through giving a eulogy at a memorial for his friend. Now that’s a sitcom, baby!
