Three cheeseburgers, three large portions of french fries, a chocolate milkshake: With this menu, Sheila Rubin celebrates her humiliation when everything becomes too much. She picks up the food at the drive-in counter, drives to a motel, locks herself in the room, and begins to stuff herself. Then she goes to the bathroom to puke. The voice in her head tells her it is fat and useless.
Sheila, married and probably in her late 30s, doesn’t like herself too much. This quickly becomes clear in the very successful series Physical at Apple +. Not necessarily because you love to watch other people suffer. But when it is portrayed as splendidly as Sheila by Australian actress Rose Byrne – close to desperation, but somehow very real and so funny – then you can easily find the joke in misery. The inner monologues of the protagonist, in which the audience participates, are helpful. “Get up, you lazy bitch,” Sheila says to herself early in the morning before she gets out of bed to make breakfast for her little daughter. And that’s still harmless.
Physical is set in San Diego, California in the early 80s and actually combines too many genres. The series is a nostalgic event in the style of Stranger Things or Glow: Sheila wears perms, develops an almost obscene passion for aerobics, and in one scene she is asked by the seller in the technology store to take a side in the “war of formats”: Betamax or VHS? The series is partly political satire because Sheila’s husband (Rory Scovel), a failed university professor with too strong a weakness for his students, is aiming for a career as a local politician. His only campaign theme is the beach, “safe the wave” is his motto. And then told Physical a story of emancipation even with original means. In the first scene of the series, Sheila and her husband try to get their married life going with a threesome. Of course they fail. Only when Sheila discovers an aerobics studio in the shopping mall does her liberation begin.
Sexual perversions of minor characters, whose existence you didn’t even know, are treated casually but seriously. A devout politician (also great: Paul Sparks) who is in a “spiritual crisis” experiences his personal liberation when he meets Sheila. And seldom has there been so much masturbation in a series.
But Physical sets something else apart from other series. How viewers can participate in the inner workings of the main character may be a mundane trick, but it works. When Sheila thinks about all the things she actually wants to say before she finally gives the good answer again, then you know it all too well. And of course the nervous inner voice and all the self-hatred are not just for the cheap laughs, there is trauma behind it. Watching Sheila slowly free herself from it is still a great pleasure.
Physical, at Apple +