Chicago Is Just as Cold and Horny and Boringly Comfortable as Easy Makes It Look

And the answer, I think, perhaps sadly but you know, also truthfully, is yes.

Because there is so much about Chicago that Joe Swanberg gets right in Easy. And I don’t just mean exterior shots. I don’t mean seeing the Bean––[extremely “well, actually” voice] it’s called Cloud Gate––or the Old Town School Of Music and thinking, “Damn, he nailed it.” I mean, stuff like lying about whether or not you bike in the snow to impress a queer girl (check!) or listening to people talk ad nauseum about the noble passion of homebrewing (check!). I mean, stuff like being a grad student who wears a bad blonde wig and seducing a graphic novelist who writes exclusively about himself and you actually are doing selfie portraiture as a master’s thesis and the two of you get into a big fight about what it means to portray self in art but ultimately come out of the situation better for it all and friends (check!––just kidding––this is the episode where Marc Maron and Emily Ratajkowksi fight about whether or not selfies are worthwhile. Do not watch it. No one in any city acts like this, let alone Chicago). Swanberg nails the stupid, boring shit that we do here all the time because we’re not anywhere else. We have the time to break down a study about gender roles because it’s 40-fucking-degrees here on a good day, and what else are we supposed to do?

And are Chicagoans actually this sex driven? Pretty much! The issue, mainly, with how horned up everyone in Easy is is that it’s not always that interesting, because sex in Chicago is not all that interesting. The take on Chicago––the reason why people are driven to it in pop culture––is often, “we’re like Los Angeles/New York City, but get this: we’re normal.” Half the plots of half of the Easy episodes are literally: “Why isn’t our sex more interesting?” (Spoiler: Because it’s Chicago, baby!) If sex and relationships are barely interesting enough when they’re set in New York City or Los Angeles, they’re certainly not interesting in Chicago, where no one is a sociopath. It’s a bit of a relief to watch Easy and see all these characters struggle to make their lives interesting. Maybe a threesome is not that exciting to you, because you live in New York City or Los Angeles where I have to assume people are having threesomes every ten minutes, but in the context of a show where the other sex options are “trying to have it” or “no longer want it,” it’s very exciting! That itself is very often the struggle of Chicago––why am I bored, and how can I be less bored? There’s a comfort to it, the boredom. It is the midwest, after all. Every man here looks like Dave Franco, which is fine—when I tell people I think Dave Franco is handsome, and they go, “Hm, I’m not sure,” and I go, “No, I’m sure,” that’s the Chicagoan in me speaking.

Sometimes it feels like Swanberg is exploring premises rather than characters. What if: a married couple wants to try out a threesome? What if: a husband and wife don’t have as much sex as they used to? What if: a graphic novelist and a selfie artist––never mind. I sat through nearly every episode as characters lamented and sighed and wondered about sex in their nice parkas, and thought, “You guys should try talk about this. What if you had a conversation about any of this?” Swanberg notably steps outside of his comfort zone (which I feel safe labelling as “white people living on the North side”) with the episode “Controlada,” which is almost entirely in Spanish and takes place in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Pilsen. And while it’s nice to see a director stretch his point of view, even “Controlada” is just a premise. An uptight husband and his wife host their old, hard-partying friend who threatens to upset their marriage. But who are any of these people besides “a husband” and “a wife” and “their friend?” I don’t know, and I don’t know that “Controlada” does either.

Yet Swanberg’s work is undeniably best when people are talking. He likes to let people talk and learn and discover things from each other, and when his characters are allowed to do that, they sound like people I know. When Swanberg has 90 minutes, he lets his characters flex and change and grow. Marriage––or dating, or cheating, or love, or sex––is not inherently interesting, but when discussed by smart, nuanced characters over a course of time? That’s something! It feels real, because much of what we do in Chicago is sit around in nice outerwear and talk to each other because it’s too fucking cold to do anything else. (Over 30 minutes, it’s a little tougher, I’d imagine. There’s a lot of plot and a lot of people and a lot of exterior shots of familiar haunts to squeeze in.)

I could talk about each of these episodes for hours, and I feel like I already have with many of my friends in Chicago. There’s a learning curve to understanding a lot of television comedies––to Girls, to You’re The Worst, to Love––which are so specific to New York or Los Angeles. We watch and understand on basic narrative levels, sure, but there will always be coastal tics we never really pick up on. It feels so distinctly Chicago of everyone here to watch this show almost immediately––“yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it,” was the response from many of my coastal city friends––and spend the following week dissecting it at every possible level. This feels especially good when it seems like Chicago often only makes its way into the cultural dialogue to discuss the violence and little else. I don’t think Easy is a complete portrait of the city, no, but it is a reflection of creatives and upstarts with a relatively diverse cast with regards to gender, sexuality, race, and age. We don’t get this opportunity a lot in Chicago. It feels rare and special and nice, even when we’re ragging on the selfie episode (I mean, honestly).