Can a man and woman be friends without their relationship turning sexual? The question is posed in the first few minutes of "Platonic," Apple TV+'s 10-half-hour-episode comedy about estranged friends from college, Will (Seth Rogen) and Sylvia (Rose Byrne), who reconnect at a precarious time in their lives. He's going through a divorce. She's questioning her marriage and her role as a mother of three. Both are edging toward a midlife crisis.
When Will tells his buddies that Sylvia's back in the picture, the men debate the implausibility of a platonic male-female friendship, and soon the conversation shifts to the 1989 film "When Harry Met Sally." The movie, they argue, is more proof that it's impossible to keep things nonsexual — especially if she's hot. And in the tradition of every other buddy romance since Meg Ryan's orgasmic screams in that deli, the series mines laughs in the "will they or won't they" tension — it's just that this time, it's aging millennials at the center of the story.
Calling attention to the 1989 film that this series echoes doesn't stop "Platonic" from feeling like a throwback, and not in a welcome, nostalgic sort of way. Though it openly plays with the tropes and cliches of 20th century romantic comedies — wives lamenting the boring task of sex with their husband, married folks looking hopelessly out of place at hip bars, dumpy dudes landing impossibly hot women — the series doesn't do enough to revise the formula.
