Firefly Lane review: season 2 goes down too many paths
Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke return to Netflix for more wig-raising, time-shifting stories
TV Reviews Firefly
If you were hoping for even more American Hustle-level hair absurdity in the second season of Firefly Lane—Netflix’s decades-spanning soap starring Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke as longtime BFFs Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey—you’re in luck: The wigs are still insane.
The hammy hairpieces pop up periodically in the dramedy’s second and final season, a supersized release that will see nine new episodes hit the streamer on December 2, with a seven-episode back half to come in 2023. (A release date for the final batch of episodes has not yet been announced.)
Worn by the two leading ladies as well as their younger counterparts Ali Skovbye and Roan Curtis, who play the characters as teens, the ever-changing coifs are meant to signal the show’s frequent timeline shifts between different stages of Tully and Kate’s lives, from the ’70s grooviness of their youth to the padded-shoulder pluckiness of their early career ambitions in the 1980s to what the series considers the present day, with the friends as fortysomethings in the early aughts. (All of the ’dos from the first season are alive and, well, not well—we’re looking at you, Cloud—but young Kate’s new high-school bowl cut is a particularly unfortunate addition to the sophomore season.)
What all of that bad wiggery actually amounts to, however, is pure follicular distraction, repeatedly removing viewers from the focus of the story—in Firefly Lane’s case, many stories—by way of wayward weaves and goofy rugs. And the show’s hair and makeup department aren’t the only ones at fault for regularly pulling you out of the plot. The very framework of Firefly Lane compromises its structural soundness: Unlike the 2008 Kristin Hannah novel on which it’s based, which chronicles Kate and Tully’s lifelong friendship in a linear fashion, the streaming series jumps between eras à la This Is Us, a construction that was difficult to keep up with in season one and is downright dreadful in season two, the threaded timelines becoming even knottier and more headache-inducing as it weaves in the early ’90s and mid-2000s.
Season one teased a major rift to come between the emergency-contact-close buds in the “future” (a.k.a. 2005), a breakup whose painfulness in season two is tempered constantly by the fact that we inelegantly and immediately flip-flop from scenes of estrangement to ones of the duo in happier times: road trips and double dates and the feather-haired days of being roommates in the ’80s. We can’t feel the weight of their separation, the sheer sorrow of losing “your person,” as Heigl’s Grey’s Anatomy cohorts once put it, if we’re not allowed to sit with the grief for even two minutes.
All of the pivotal moments and big questions of season two—will Johnny survive that IED attack in Iraq? Will Tully finally track down her birth father? And what event could possibly drive Kate and Tully apart after all these years?—are treated as fleetingly and flippantly as sillier, lower-stakes scenes, like sitcom-y bits involving the teenage pals hiding a “dead” body or twentysomething Kate burning her butt cheeks during a fake-tan treatment. (You can almost hear the canned laughter in the background.) With viewers being constantly tasked with the switching of tone as well as time periods, it softens any emotional wallop the drama could have had. And in patching together Beaches-lite melodrama, newsroom comedy, coming-of-age high-school hijinks, and, least successful of all, cliffhanger-heavy mystery, Firefly Lane’s second season is less a genre hybrid than a Frankenstein-like creation built for the “Live Laugh Love” set.
It’s a shame because Heigl and Chalke do good work in those messier, tense scenes between Tully and Kate, the former hollowed out by the confusion of sudden loss and the latter simmering in rage and resentment. Rom-com veteran Heigl (27 Dresses, The Ugly Truth) has always seemed sharper than the work she’s been given and unfortunately Firefly Lane season two is much of the same, despite the actress gamely taking on the show’s dull handling of edgier, real-deal issues like workplace misogyny, childhood trauma, and abandonment. (She is also an executive producer on the series.) Chalke is even less lucky in the second season, hindered by a will-they-of-course-they-will romantic storyline with Kate’s ex-husband Johnny Ryan (Ben Lawson) that’s devoid of any real heart or heat.
It’s also a shame, though much less to the fault of the Firefly Lane cast and crew, that an even better rumination on female friendship, forgiveness, and the grasp of grief came out on the same streaming platform just a few weeks prior, in the form of Dead to Me’s third and final season. Like that Christina Applegate-Linda Cardellini vehicle, Firefly Lane’s last season deals with the trials and tribulations of an odd-couple pair, from shocking medical diagnoses to guy problems and even a car-crash mystery, but without the clear-cut trajectory that allows for similar growth and grace in its own sisterly soulmates. Firefly Lane may bill itself as comfort viewing, but there’s no catharsis to be found here.
Despite all of the decades, it seems as though Firefly Lane hasn’t learned much over the years. As dependable as an old friend, all of the stuff that was wrong with season one is still wrong with it this time down the road—and, yes, especially the hair.
Part one of Firefly Lane season two premieres December 2 on Netflix.
5 Comments
Season one had one of my all time favorite goofs I’ve seen in a show. In episode seven, there was a scene set in a bar in the 80’s. Behind where the characters were sitting were several pinball machines that wouldn’t be released for years later including ones from the movies The Addams Family and Godzilla which were both released in the 90’s. They’re so bright and colorful that your eyes are drawn to them making their inclusion that much funnier.
The Get Down had one of the Alt/1977 ads, which were a design project imagining 70s-style advertisements for modern technology, appear on the back of a magazine in, well, 1977. Production mistake not realizing the ad was fake or deliberate anachronism?
For the love of god stop being so bitter.. What I read was just “shame this shame that shame the other” .. seriously go do something else
I don’t think season 2 is as bad as the reviewer says, but I do think the time jumps were too often and too quick. I did enjoy it. Plus I was rooting for Kate and Jack so I didn’t mind the will they won’t they scenario. The thing that bugged me the most is that besides the hairstyles, the characters didn’t look any different in the time jumps (other than the teenage years of course because those were different actors). How do these people not age? BTW the second part is season 2 does have a release date. It’s June 2023 and by the looks of the teaser, the second half of season 2 might be a bit of a tear jerker.
I finished watching the series, and although I enjoyed some parts of it, I disliked most of them.
I will mention what I liked: the actresses playing the two protagonists, both in their young and adult versions, did a good job, trying to give some depth to characters that are after all not so interesting or likeable. The chemistry among them is excellent.
On the other hand, while some might be endeared by the friendship between Kate and Tully, but in the end it’s clear that Tully has always been holding Kate down.
Also, as pointed out in several reviews, the back and forth from the past to the present often not only breaks the narrative continuity in a pointless way, but also oddly annihilates the dramatic tone of some plotlines.
Kate is awfully static: an underachiever, who only has one love and one friend through her whole life. I don’t want to sound cynical, but this might explain her illness (about which I have to add that for once, the shift among the three chronological planes, showing how her breast has been a problem for her through different phases of her life, works well). As a matter of fact the only reason why Kate keeps getting back with Johnny and getting back to the friendship with Tully seems to be that she does not know how to be partner or friends with someone else. By not hanging out with anyone through her life, she can’t even communicate with a female friend differently than the way she does with Tully (she calls her stiff sort of new friend from the writing course “Yo bitch”, much to the shock of the latter…). In the scene where Tully sees Kate with her new “friend” she comments on how now Kate has moved on and has a new friend. What are Kate and Tully, kindergarten girls, or adult women? But I guess in their world a person who walks with you is for sure your new best friend, with whom you have an exclusive relationship.
I take special issues with the final episodes: characters behave erratically and randomly show some nasty aspects we haven’t seen before. The young adult Kate all at once becomes a cheater and causes her fiancé to lose a testicle (by the way: how on earth would once lose a testicle by falling in a bathtub??), and teenage Kate involuntarily causes the death of her friend.
In response to Johnny’s realistically giving up on having Kate go through a clinical trial, Tully says “F** you, Kate was always too good for you”. Wow, we know she was self-centred, but now we find out she’s actually an awfully insensitive jerk, by insulting a husband who knows he’s going to lose his wife. Not to mention the fact that she behaves like a bipolar person with Danny, by ignoring his calls just because she’s upset by Kate’s illness (why people, especially men, keep forgiving her volatile behaviour, is a mystery to me).
Also, in the final episodes we see the plot itself developing in random new directions, like a broken compass. We see Kate and Tully’s relationship turninto into a sort of asexual lesbian romance (as most clearly shown when their young versions end up playing Romeo and Juliet and kiss). And we see young adult Tully becoming all at once morbidly jealous of Johnny, and developing a sort of asexual threesome relationship with him and Kate.
I won’t comment on the wigs and makeup, but I still want to note that S. Chalke and B. Lawson have no chemistry. K. Heigl and I. Serricchio are a bit better, but in my opinion they don’t look well together.