Stream It Or Skip It: ‘On The Verge’ On Netflix, A Comedy About Four Fortysomething Women Trying To Live The Lives They Envisioned`

On The Verge, created, written and directed by Julie Delpy, attempts to take a look at four forty-something women trying to recapture the lives they treasured before families, work and other commitments got in the way. It’s supposed to be a unique look at how women deal with their midlife crises; they don’t go buy sports cars like men might do, but nearing or passing the half-century mark is still jarring to them. Read on for more.

ON THE VERGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Four women, looking like they’re in paintball gear, looking out from where they are stationed.

The Gist: “Almost Two Months Earlier,” (also the name of the episode), Justine (Julie Delpy), a well-known chef who is writing a cookbook, has trouble finding a bodily cavity to describe a hole that has been torn out of her subject. No matter, she has to go to a birthday dinner for her friend Yasmin (Sarah Jones). She asks her husband Martin (Mathieu Demy) if he likes her dress; in his usual minimizing fashion, he tells her to put a jacket over it.

We also see the other two members of this friend group, all of whom live in a pre-pandemic Los Angeles, getting ready. Anne (Elisabeth Shue), sketches in her notebook as her family plays, while Ell (Alexia Landeau) has to scrape together change to buy a discounted bouquet of odorless roses. At the dinner, Ell retells the story of a “date” she went on with Justine’s boss Jerry (Giovanni Ribisi). She talks to him about how, as a single mom of 3 teens/preteens from 3 different guys and on the verge of being broke, she’s about to break down. She gives him a blowie just as he’s about to give her a blank check to help her out. But the way Ell tells the story, one begat the other.

Of course, when Justine confronts Jerry about it, he tells her the truth and that, with his sex addiction he wouldn’t even go there. Meantime, Yasmin tries to get back into the workforce after twelve years of being a mom to her son Orion (Jayden Haynes-Starr), and has a panic attack when the HR person says she’s overqualified and implies she’s too old. When she gets home, she unloads on her husband William (Timm Sharp) and flees to the beach.

Anne, remembering Yas’ dramatic tendencies from when the three of them met her at a New Year’s party in 2000, calls Justine and Ell to try and find her. Anne gets to her first and Yas tells her that she just wants to be the engaged Black and Persian woman that she was before she had Orion.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? On The Verge sort of feels like Girls if all the characters were twenty years older and in full midlife crisis mode.

Our Take: Delpy created and wrote On The Verge; she also directed the first episode along with four of the others in the 12-episode season. Her goal in creating the show was to examine how these four women, in their 40s and early 50s, all in different stations in life, are trying to recapture the lives they had envisioned for themselves. But what comes out is four characters that are less relatable than Delpy likely intended.

We’re not in the camp that says that characters have to be likable to be relatable. But the fact that these four women are intensely unlikable hurts the narrative of the show. That narrative, in the first episode anyway, also feels very herky-jerky, taking turns that feel sudden, like when Yasmin melts down to the point where she thinks that her dutiful — if un-empathetic — husband is killing their marriage. Sure, it is a true-to-life turn, but for some reason doesn’t quite feel earned here.

But right now, there’s nothing about these four characters — and we really don’t know anything about Shue’s character Anne by the end of the episode — that makes us want to continue watching them. They feel like caricatures and there’s nothing about the story that will make them feel more fleshed out, likely because no real through-plot has been established.

Sex and Skin: Besides the out-of-the-shot blowjob and the discussion of it, there’s nothing. Why Ell would even accuse Jerry of paying for it is beyond us. That feels like another unearned attempt at humor by Delpy; we don’t know enough about Ell to acknowledge that she might do something like this.

Parting Shot: Justine continues to write her book, “If the hole, the nothing, is everywhere, how do you manage not to fall into it? That said, let’s go back to our recipe.” Then she starts writing about scraping the browned bits from a pan to add flavor.

Sleeper Star: We want to see more of Timm Sharp as William, one of the few characters we actually relate to.

Most Pilot-y Line: Justine tells her son Albert (Christopher Convery) that homeless people are “angry” and “crazy” when he tells her his class is going to work at shelter for a class project. Is that line there to establish Justine’s unlikability? Because that pretty much cemented it for us.

Our Call: SKIP IT. On The Verge is so disjointed in its storytelling and so surface with its character development that it actually made us not want to see another episode. And that’s hard to do for a show that features both Delpy and Shue.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream On The Verge On Netflix