


Susannah flood movies full#
But the most painful events are teased in bits and pieces, to be revealed in full only later in the season when Beth is ready to come to terms with them. Sometimes, they’re complete anecdotes about her first kiss or the mockery she endured after she flashed some boys on a dare. She reconnects with old friends and makes new ones, tries her hand at outdoor activities like fishing and farming, considers reorienting her job or jumping to another career entirely.Īll the while, she’s flooded with memories of her middle-school years in that same home. In the wake of sudden change, Beth finds herself back at her childhood home on Long Island, away from the stable but uninspiring wine-sales job and superficially charming but unbearably self-obsessed boyfriend (Kevin Kane) that define her life in Manhattan.
Susannah flood movies series#
At its best, as in an episode that draws parallels between Beth’s love life and her bittersweet history with her dad (Michael Rapaport), the series feels as personal as a therapy session. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing for the rawness that Schumer - who not only stars but created the series and wrote and directed most of its episodes inspired by her own experiences - brings to the table. Helping to keep things interesting is an eclectic array of guest stars who include Hank Azaria as a dyspeptic funeral director and David Byrne as a doctor with an awkward bedside manner.Amy Schumer, Hasan Minhaj Among Just for Laughs Award Winners A long scene in which Beth John and Beth’s sister, Ann (Susannah Flood), fish while on mushrooms has an engaging, improvisatory vibe. Jonathan Groff shows up in an amusing bit as a Long Island Lothario who’s attracted to Beth because of her Manhattan connection his obsessive love for the city is right out of an early Billy Joel song. There are highlights on both sides, mostly in what feel like stand-alone sequences that have the energy and inventiveness that Schumer brought to sketch comedy. But it’s a superficial tie, and the show’s tone and style swerve between the more solemn family material and the more comic love story. The two story strands are connected - Beth’s attraction to the rustic John, and her reintroduction to Long Island’s natural beauty, is part of the mellowing process that eventually allows her to reconcile herself to her past. Going on at the same time is the rom-com, in which Beth blows up her relationship with a man-child co-worker (Kevin Kane) and begins to fall for farmer John, who tends to the vegetables and animals at a Long Island vineyard. As events in the present trigger continual flashbacks to Beth’s childhood, it’s as if Schumer were digging up the roots of her own stage persona. Schumer has spoken about her husband, Chris Fischer, being on the autism spectrum Beth’s romantic interest, John (Michael Cera), demonstrates a pronounced, if generally charming, social and personal awkwardness.īeth, an unhappy Manhattan wine saleswoman, experiences a personal loss that sends her on a memory journey through her Long Island childhood and forces her to confront her feelings about her judgmental, needy mother (Laura Benanti). Schumer created “Life & Beth” and wrote half the episodes (she also directed four), and the known congruences between her life and that of her heroine, Beth Jones, align it with other personal shows by female comedians like “Somebody Somewhere,” “One Mississippi” and “Better Things.” Beth, like Schumer, attended high school in suburban Long Island like Schumer, she experienced a change in lifestyle when her father’s business failed.

But for the true fan, they’ll be worth the relatively short binge. They’re stretched out a little too thinly over the 10 half-hour episodes, and they don’t really compensate for the overall sentimentality and simplistic psychology. It’s not a triumphant one, but it has touches of the old Schumer, smart and transgressive and self-aware. Still, the autobiographical-ish “Life & Beth,” premiering Friday on Hulu, feels like a return.
Susannah flood movies tv#
Amy Schumer has not been absent from television during the six years since the end of her intermittently brilliant sketch show, “Inside Amy Schumer.” She’s had a couple of Netflix stand-up specials and made a detour into reality TV (“Amy Schumer Learns to Cook,” “Expecting Amy”).
