Rejoining the dating pool once middle age has set in can be lonely, but apparently if you are gay in New York, it's tantamount to living in exile. Looks remain hyper important regardless of impending age, and Mike's once boyish looks have weathered like jerky so, freshly dumped, he's fretting about wrinkles. The fact he has lasted so long without getting Botox is dubious, especially when we learn in a later episode that Botox for much more private areas is also a thing. In a city like New York, Botox is not something reserved for the wealthy and old and for women and homosexuals over 29, it's considered a running household expense. But there are greater issues with the show than the characters' facial lines - their hackneyed speaking lines, for example.
The same way the unsuspecting birthday boy is led up the steps to the secret party, viewers are led to predict both the plot and the lines of the entire show well before they happen. Every twist, turn and gag is down a well-beaten path so watching this is closer to experiencing deja vu than TV. Rather like watching someone deliberately fall over, in slow motion - it was forced the first time we saw it.
The actors do their best with what's available but the supply is slim. Mike's posse of suitably camp friends are basically diluted male versions of the leading Sex and the City characters, except for the one based on SATC's Carrie's gay friend Stanford, conveniently named Stanley. His fun and sassy black female co-worker is unfairly tasked with jetting out a long list of dead-end one-liners at him and the pace is wincingly off. Maybe what's really absent from their clipped banter is canned audience laughter.
There's nothing really awful about Uncoupled. Despite its tropes and banality, it's familiar enough and light after all but something fundamentally missing is the depth of the main character. A couple of decades ago, leading roles in sitcoms were essentially one-dimensional joke machines (like Roxanne or Everybody Loves Raymond) but today's audiences expect a little more. The inimitable title character in Fleabag comes bearing her flaws which only deepen over the show, and over this time we begin to understand and admire her more. Like a pot plant we have nurtured since a seedling, we are invested.
Mike's character development is more like a small bouquet of fresh flowers left out of water, which soon grow limp and weak, losing their colour and appeal. His handful of sexual encounters are all so tame, gentle and innocent, better suited to a chaste and much older man, like an aged Frasier. It's as though the producers were afraid of giving us a flawed main character in case we didn't warm to him, that just by virtue of being gay, single and over 40, he was flawed enough.
By the end of the show, Colin remarks to his ex lover, "You seem ... different", but he's the only one to have noticed any change.
Uncoupled could have been an original cross between Selling Sunset, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Desperate Housewives meets Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but instead, it's old Frasier starring in a weak rehash of SATC, without the fashion or revolution, and a whole lot less sex.
