Easy

Subtext gives Easy its tart edge, emboldening it with an obsessiveness that resists fashionable platitudes. Swanberg captures the frictions between men and women and yuppies and bohemians, revealing a common core of fear that the other has got it better.

For as easy as it would be to get lost in the look and feel of the new series, Swanberg has a lot to say with Easy. Some arguments may be more compelling than others, and Easy itself is distinctly understated in almost every regard (much like its setting).

There are moments in each episode when a disarming sincerity shines through, and you realize that you’re seeing that rarity of rarities: television characters who are having substantive, free-ranging conversations about something other than their own needs, and finding themselves getting closer to something like mutual understanding. This is hard to do without coming off as pompous or Polyannaish, but Easy makes it look easy.

The themes and situations Swanberg and co. explore are so specific and relatable they sting.

Ratajkowski’s insightful observations cut through Maron’s monologues, but there’s no clear winner, of course. There are no buttons here so much as pins in a discussion. Swanberg’s modular approach to storytelling offers one of the few true snacking options among Netflix’s binging fare, which is almost as satisfying.

And yet one wishes that Swanberg had tried a bit harder to get out of his intimate, meandering comfort zone. It would be interesting to see what Swanberg would produce if he gave himself a more difficult challenge.

The Maron episode, the fifth, is the best of the bunch, and feels at least somewhat biographical. ... Other episodes have a tendency to feel narratively forced.

The low-key, improvisatory nature of the work can strike some as remarkably natural and authentic, and others as fingernails-on-the-blackboard exasperating. ... [The actors are] all good, though only Ms. Mbatha-Raw really breaks through the restraints of the short format and delivers something powerful.