Easy. Definition: a time in your early to late twenties when you’re living in the batshit city mingling at parties and having steamy romances that are non-network-friendly, and understanding the truth behind vacuity like “l’art pour l’art”.

Lemon Squeezy. Definition: getting all up in dem titties cos here we go season two, I’ve got access to a Netflix account, and three essays I should be doing for university but amn’t.

Easy is an anthology series that wanders around the north-side of Chicago picking up loose threads of stories from a mishmash of celebrity fornicators like Orlando Bloom, as well as painting impassioned vignettes of artists, comedians, sex-workers, brewers, stay-at-homers, caught in the middle of coffee-swilling veganist hipsterdom, all swirled together like fabled frappuccinos in the Starbucks of life.

I love this show.

Scoring a whopping 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and 72 on Metacritic, the statistics can almost speak for themselves. But after ruthless backlash and hypothesising of an apocryphal “rape-culture” in the show, I felt the need to defend it for all its utterly engorging documentarianism of human life. I mean, c’mon. The only unappealing aspect of the show is Dave Franco’s smug fraternity-pledge-style acting which denotes his dwarf-star status. The Disaster Artist? Wait…you’re telling me he’s not describing himself?

Season two of Easy dropped at the beginning of December like a whisper, undetectably subtle, as is the norm in the “mumblecore” genre made famous by writer/creator of the show, Joe Swanberg. Swanberg became famous for this micro-budgeting style of handheld filmmaking in which he doesn’t so much “write” the scenes as allows the actors to explore their creative range as improv performers, while Swanberg, like an overseeing swan, guides the flock of waddling actors towards a general locus in which the dramatic force breaches the surface before sinking again. I can hear your salty cries of hatred against the Netflix algorithm for misanalysing our desires. We don’t want boring, broad scenes which come in and out of dramatic focus, whose sex scenes are too quick-cut and aggressive; I can hear you denouncing Swanberg as a “writer” who doesn’t write. But, in that scenario, Larry David must be an utter hack too, no? I proclaim, this is decent watching. It’s better than decent. It’s fan service to peoplewatchers. Hyperrealism. Danette Chavez of AV/TV Club notes that Swanberg’s approach “offers one of the few true snacking options among Netflix’s binging fare”; and I would add, earnestly, it is simply one of the best shows out there. Quite.

The stories in Easy aren’t prescriptive. The people? Normal, selfish, and willing to toe the ethical lines of their relationships that make for some good television. The advent of a (ugh) “millennial” (end ugh) approach to relationships, as well as PC-culture, has brought with it a slew of amazing new shows. We can rely on, for example, Community to bring the meta analysis of sitcom tropes to the screen for re-evaluation; we can rely on Master of None for its social commentary on a post-racial society; in the same vein, HBO’s Louie delves into the sad-clown affect of tortured comedians in a surreal and inconsequential way. But, as Sonia Saraiya of Variety mentions, none of those shows carry the same sense of “both welcoming and suffocati[on]” that Easy does. You feel there, with them. In the moment. Reified, as if a line between objectivity and subjectivity has been hopped. And now we’re all skip-roping together. What makes this show so unique? It’s in the title. It doesn’t try so hard to convey a message. The stories about marriage don’t represent the whole of modern marriage as an institution; they are full of tactile, vibrant images of real human beings. Sure, the celebrity cameos are a crutch that yank attention away from the beauty of their banality. But the people are not static cut-outs; they are dynamic, willing to make changes, willing to speak, open, and transparent, which doesn’t detract from their characterisation. In fact, it fills them all the more with earnest pathos.

But there is a fervent backlash against the show, specifically in reference to season one episode four entitled “Controlada” for its aestheticisation of a Spanish-speaking woman being raped by a former lover against a window, while her husband sleeps in the other room. The Mary Sue, a feminist news website, regards the rape scene as visually aesthetic to downplay the seriousness of the violation, and perpetuate “rape culture” in society. I tried to get in contact with the writer of the article, but discovered both her website and twitter handle rerouted to inactive pages. She writes,

While it would be easy to pass off the show as condemning rape by explicitly showing it, I fear these scenes are just not uncomfortable for men. To the untrained eye, these scenes might just be another portrayal of marriage or a drunken one-night stand. Men can easily watch this and see nothing wrong with it, especially because of how unaffected or (even worse) happy the women are after their sexual assault experiences.

The scene which she refers to is nothing if not uncomfortable, and its uncomfortability is ensured by the arrangement of events up until the rape scene. From either male or female perspective, an undeniable violation is portrayed onscreen. As was the purpose. We are led to abhor the ex-lover from the first moment as a home-invading cockroach who steals time away from the normality of the couple’s life. Effectively, the episode is an exploration into the events which lead to rape, not an aestheticisation of it, and warns that even ex-lovers and people we once trusted can commit horrible crimes against us. The notion that men feel nothing while watching this, and citing only one psychological essay as messianic evidence to implicate men in “rape-culture” is, frankly, insulting.

Enough about that. Back to the good part.

There’s two things in season two that are worth mentioning. Episode 3, “Side Hustle”, and the masterpiece that is episode 7, “Lady Cha Cha”.

“Side Hustle” introduces us to two previously unknowns, the first is blogger/sex-worker Sally and the second is Uber/tour-bus-driver/comedian, Od. Focussing on Sally, one notices immediately her sharp intellect. When, as Easy does so easily, Sally and Od cross paths by chance, she describes her writing as a series of “essays that tend to deal with sexuality and, I don’t know, contemporary feminism, or like, criticising contemporary feminism more recently these days.” When pushed for an elaboration, she explains that she “goes on a lot of angry rants that critique female sexual victimisation which I think is an increasingly essential part of certain factions of the feminist movement…so I basically write a tonne of pro-slut manifestos sort of disguised as personal essays that are meant to be entertaining.” Her voice seems to emanate with the teachings of Camille Paglia who in January came out with a book of essays called Free Women Free Men, a book I reviewed on my YouTube channel. And lo and behold, the red cover of her book appears on her coffee table during the episode as a nice little nod to the show’s influences. (It’s also the book she hides banknotes in earlier in the episode, fun fact).

Saraiya of Variety speculates that Easy refers to the sexual circus of “loving, curious abandon” prevalent in the show, but it also defines the ease with which previously taboo or unviable career options present themselves as authentic modes of breadwinning. The dichotomy in “Side Hustle” is such that, while Sally pursues her “pro-slut” career, Od juggles Uber driving with daytime Chicago tours, with the ultimate dream being to create a TV-show out of his comedic routine. We are invited invisibly to join the pair on their separate daily routines, watching how Od takes his lunch alone in the bus, how Sally makes friendly small and big talk with her clients, discovering the unique quirks of working in unconventional careers which, in Uber’s case, might not have even existed ten years ago, or in Sally’s case, might not have been considered, period. This show contemporises issues to fit our modern day society. It’s not just a rampant ooze of sex and debauchery, as many have stated, but perhaps a social document with emancipative tendencies. We don’t have to feel like weirdos for being in unusual careers. The episode reaffirms that it’s not what you do but how you do it that’s important. It’s all in the hustle, after all.

Similarly, “Lady Cha Cha” interrogates emancipation, this time through the ways we interpret feminism. This penultimate episode of season 2 revisits lesbian couple Chase and Jo from season 1 a year after their rockshow hook-up. Chavez writes that Chase of season 1, played by the breathtaking Kiersey Clemons, is an impressionable student “making valiant attempts to adopt her activist girlfriend’s vegan lifestyle,” a lifestyle which, ironically, makes her unhealthy. “This desire for self-improvement”, writes Chavez, “is a preexisting one” that feeds into our “need for validation” in the pursuit of “personal development.” This couple has already been through a lot together. They’ve matured because they built their lives around each other. And now that they’re settled in, new labours in the form of “Lady Cha Cha” are appearing.

Chase has been taking part in burlesque dance classes, and has gotten pretty good at them. She entertains her gallery-curator girlfriend, Jo, each night with a dance, which precedes love-making. But it’s when Chase expresses her desire to put these newly-acquired skills to the test in an actual performance that Jo’s possessiveness strikes. She takes down fliers Chase has put up to post her own fliers for her upcoming art show. When Jo reprimands Chase for handing out burlesque pamphlets on the night of her exhibition, Chase lets it go, but not for long. What follows is an artsy feminist ‘free-the-nipple’ dance with girls taking off their tops and rubbing paint all over themselves, in full view of an enthralled audience. Chase runs off, upset, before stealing a look at Jo. The double standard is realised in the screaming match between the two; Jo, despite embodying the principles of feminism, despite putting on art shows where women disrobe theatrically – owning their sexuality – in much the same way as a burlesque dancer would, cannot face the idea of allowing Chase to perform for others, because she is jealous.

This is one of the most captivating moments in the show, the battle of the theoretical mind with its building blocks of reason, and the personal mind full of sentiment. What values do we promise to adhere to, which we cannot uphold in the the light of another? What do we deserve from our lovers? What do we seek? Can we look our lovers in the eyes and feel they want what’s best for us? That they, above all, would never claim us, that they would allow us the freedom to live in our bodies? Isn’t that what we want?

I think yes. As much as this show is a progressive, liberal masterwork for American TV, it reinforces ye olde traditional love-me-let-me-go values. After Orlando Bloom, Malin Ackerman and Kate Micucci’s attempted threesome, the wife and husband are the ones who find the truest love in each other, and the episode ends with the family unit being restored. In “Lady Cha Cha”, Jo sacrifices her vanity and shows up supporting Chase at her burlesque show because that’s what lovers do. Meaghan Garvey of the Chicago Reader puts it rather succinctly when she writes that all of the “characters are tenderly idealized, even in their fuck-ups, to the point of complacency—nice people with relatable growing pains and artsy hobbies who talk, in a chill way, about absolutely nothing.” Which is so like life. We’re not preoccupied with answering questions, so much as posing them, debating them, and reaching only tentative resolutions. If there’s any point to it at all, it’s probably that we find the pieces that fit the puzzle on our own.

That, and we can at least appreciate the smooth soundtrack playing like a poignant paean to the city of Chicago in the background as we listen, clutching close the person we most love.

And lots of kewl boobies.