That blip of a generation known as X, born roughly between 1964 and 1982 (including yours truly), is accustomed to being overlooked. That’s always been our chief gripe, but it’s also been a blessing in disguise, allowing us to sit back and watch as baby boomers and millennials fight to the death.
Turn on your television, meanwhile, and Generation X seems to be quietly having its day. Our Friends and Party of Five years are well behind us, but our razory snark and cloudy-day cynicism is sometimes on competent display, inspired by our most influential compatriots, including Tina Fey (born in 1970), Ryan Murphy (1965), Dave Chappelle (1973) and Louis C.K. (1967).
Betwixt and between the old analog world and the digital one, we play grown-ups now — doctors or presidents or recently divorced detectives. Most often we play sitcom parents who stand as the last defense between civil order and the techno-narcissism that awaits. Our spotlight is fading, but it was never all that bright.
It is deeply satisfying, then, to recommend two entertaining dramedies — Loudermilk on DirecTV and Better Things on FX — that feature main characters who each offer unapologetic expressions of Generation X in a state of grumpy, middle-aged dissatisfaction. Too many of TV’s Gen-X characters are seen as icy, hypercapable bosses (see 48-year-old Anne Heche as an intelligence officer who remote-commands a special-ops outfit in NBC’s The Brave), working overtime to prevent chaos (50-year-old Keifer Sutherland as a conspiracy-plagued U.S. president in ABC’s Designated Survivor; 51-year-old Tea Leoni as an overworked diplomat on CBS’s Madam Secretary; 40-year-old Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope in ABC’s Scandal), or, once in a while, serving as master manipulators (48-year-old Christian Slater in USA’s Mr. Robot).
What’s frequently missing is the generation’s more subtle and artful expressions of indecisive lassitude — the built-in alienation; the lifelong romance with ennui. I miss that about us.
Peter Farrelly and Bobby Mort’s bitterly funny Loudermilk, a 10-episode dramedy premiering Tuesday on the AT&T/Audience Network, offers an aged example of the species, with Ron Livingston starring as Sam Loudermilk, a 50-year-old former rock critic and recovering alcoholic who lives in the city once regarded as the epitome of Gen-X ethos (and pathos): Seattle.
Loudermilk supervises an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter that meets at a Catholic church; at night, he’s a janitor polishing marble floors in office lobbies. He shares a shabby but comfortable apartment with his sponsor and best friend, Ben (Will Sasso). Loudermilk resents technology and happily takes on the preoccupied busybodies who invade his slacker realm.
“You live in a world with other people. Get your nose out of your phone and you might see that,” he tells a young woman who has taken advantage of his courtesy to cut in front of him in line at the coffee shop and recite a long list of drink orders. “Why are you getting coffee for the whole office?” he continues. “Have you never heard of Betty Friedan? Gloria Steinem?”
“Maybe you need to be on medication,” she replies.
“I am on medication,” Loudermilk yells. “It’s called coffee, and I can’t get it because I have to wait for you to order for everyone in your millennial clown car.”
With just enough wear and wrinkles enhancing his boyish sarcasm, Livingston gives a fine performance as a man whose sourness is an attribute. Kids, this is what happens to the man who can never stick to the sunny side of the street: He becomes the living ghost of old John Cusack movies.
We soon discover that Loudermilk did find love, once, but he lost it in an inebriated car crash. Now four years sober, Loudermilk is content to be a curmudgeon. He brightens a bit at the arrival of an attractive next-door neighbor (Laura Mennell), but the real change in his life comes when he takes pity on a young addict, Claire (Anja Savcic), who copes with her father’s death through drugs and alcohol.
All this, and still it’s a comedy. Co-creator Farrelly, who with his brother made a string of such delightfully ill-mannered movies as Dumb & Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, has retained an essential (if risky) belief that jokes about bestiality, substance abuse and people with disabilities (with disabled actors playing those roles) can still be funny when expertly handled, and he’s not wrong.
Despite a number of tangential shenanigans, Loudermilk focuses resolutely on its title character’s permanent condition, which is resonant of an old Nirvana track: I hate myself and want to die. Loudermilk is old enough to have improved on the sentiment. He hates himself (and plenty of others), but living sure beats the alternative.
A similarly beautiful grouchiness sets the tone for Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, currently in its superb second season Thursday nights on FX.
In the tradition of nothing-means-everything vignettes, the show explores the believably exasperating life of Sam Fox (played by 51-year-old Adlon), a single mother of three demanding daughters in Los Angeles. Sam, who found early success as a child actress, pieces together enough bit parts, voice-overs and commercial work to eke out a comfortable living for her family, as well as her mother, Phyllis (Celia Imrie), who somewhat ungratefully occupies the guesthouse.
A few of Better Things’s best moments have also involved the dreaded get-off-your-phone conflicts that seem mandatory whenever Gen-X tries to connect with its Gen-Z offspring. In one memorable restaurant scene last season, Sam suggests that her tuned-out teenager Max (Mikey Madison) go sit with the man at the next table who is more interested in his phone than his female companion. “You should sit over there since you both don’t listen, and I will sit here with (his) lovely date.”