Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Why Are You Like This’ On Netflix, Where Two Women In Their 20s Try To Make Things Right While Ticking Everyone Off

Two cringeworthy comedies premiere on streaming services today: Amazon’s Frank Of Ireland and Netflix’s Why Are You Like This. Both have characters that are irredeemable, but while the title character of Frank is basically an idiot, the main characters of Why Are You Like This are too smart for their own good. Is this the funnier way to do cringe comedy?

WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We hear a woman named Mia (Olivia Junkeer) talk to her boss about the fact that he thinks it’s OK to impose “white normative regulations” on her. He responds that wearing shoes in the office is required by Australia’s version of OSHA.

The Gist: Mia gets “made redundant” from that job, not just because of the shoe thing; she takes multiple breaks a day for prayer and shut off someone’s phone ringer without asking, citing noise pollution. When she realizes she gets a severance, she’s elated. We then see her best friend Penny (Naomi Higgins), the only female coder at her software company. She presents an “Are You OK?” program to her workmates, and none of them care about checking in on their emotions. They do think playing video games one night at work is baller.

Flush with her severance, Mia and Penny go out to a Melbourne pub on Drag Night, to see their other friend Austin (Will King) perform. He complains about a fellow performer who revels in drama. Anyway, the next morning, Mia realizes that her severance was only $400, and now she owes Penny some money. She needs to find a job, but not the same kind as what she had. Citing a desire to get outside, she takes a gig helping a farmer inseminate cows. But she gets exhausted shoveling manure and quits, citing that what the farmer is doing is considered rape. She gets in trouble at another job, as a receptionist in a clinic, when that supposed “drama queen” comes in and collapses, and Mia completely ignores him.

At Penny’s office, she tries to get some ideas from her deskmate Daniel (Lawrence Leung) about an LGBTQ party, and he says she’s “pushing it”. She then tries to push it farther, and then when he says he doesn’t watch RuPaul’s Drag Race, she wants to report him as a homophobe. She gets a surprise, though, when her boss talks to Daniel and then shakes his hand. At an office get together, Mia finds out from Austin that he once lost his grandmother’s ring inside the bum of that supposed homophobe. Yes, Daniel is gay, but Penny wants to keep pushing the homophobe thing to embarrassing heights.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Why Are You Like This combines the cringeworthiness of Broad City with the annoying earnestness of Girls.

Our Take: The first episode of Why Are You Like This, created by Higgins, Humyara Mahbub and Mark Samual Bonanno, first aired as part of an Australian Broadcasting Company anthology in 2018; all subsequent episodes — which the Aussie ABC produced in conjunction with Netflix — are new this year.

We understand where the trio of creators are trying to go with Mia and Penny; they’re so “woke” that they’ve weaponized their wokeness to the point where everyone around them is completely miserable in their presence. But instead of just making these women look like parodies of themselves. But in trying to parody the super-wokeness of young millennials and zoomers, they’ve made Mia and Penny — and to a lesser extent, Austin — into two complete narcissists who never really consider how the people around them are affected by what they do.

This model is not new to the TV landscape, as we cited two of the main examples above of the “young women being awful” genre. However, both worked in different ways; Abbi and Ilana on Broad City had at least some self-awareness that their awfulness was in fact awful. In Girls, Hannah’s flaws were constantly pointed out to her by her friends and the people she dates.

Mia and Penny do get comeuppance here, but it doesn’t feel like they’re aware that using wokeness as a weapon can go too far. Mia is especially unaware, like when Austin sees her using “financial domination” to extort money from what turns out to be Penny’s boss, Austin does tell her that she’s crossed the line into extortion, but she keeps going. Being a sociopath isn’t a good source of comedy, no matter what anyone thinks, and if Mia and Penny are already drifting into that territory during the first episode, how much worse are they going to get?

Sex and Skin: None, at least in the first episode. Obviously, there’s lots of talk but that’s all it is.

Parting Shot: As Penny’s boss gets extorted by Mia over text, Daniel comes and pats him on the shoulder for support… then squeezes.

Sleeper Star: Lawrence Leung is refreshingly low key as Daniel. We’d like an episode from his perspective as Penny annoys the living bejeezus out of him on the daily.

Most Pilot-y Line: “You’re 100% raping these cows,” Mia says to the farmer as a way of getting out of finishing a day of hard work.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Why Are You Like This feels more like a live-action cartoon than a show about people that may exist in real life. And there’s a reason why cartoon characters can get away with anything and human characters can’t.

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 Why Are You Like This On Netflix