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Review: 'Physical' Hurts, Sometimes on Purpose - Vulture
Jun 16, 2021 1 min, 34 secs

From a brief glance at Physical — at the title, at the half-hour run time, at the glitzy, soft-focus neon art full of shiny spandex and hair permed to high heaven — it could be easy to misread.

The Rose Byrne–starring series (which premieres its first three episodes this Friday on Apple TV+, followed by a weekly rollout of the remaining seven) is packaged like a comedy and full of funny potential, especially given Byrne’s too rarely used comedic chops.

Appearances are so often deceiving, though, which is as true for Physical as for the characters who inhabit the series.

Physical may have the run time of a small, relatively contained series (ten half-hour episodes), but it has aspirations beyond just Sheila.

As the story develops, Physical sprawls out more like a prestige drama, slowly collecting a passel of other unhappy misfits, each Sheila-esque in the distance between their outer selves and their inner lives.

It’s a problem with Sheila, but it’s also a problem with capitalism, man.

It’s that Physical wants to be so much more, to so many more characters, and it struggles to negotiate the transition between Sheila’s barbed internal world and the lives of everyone else.

There are gestures at all kinds of bigger things throughout Physical.

Most tellingly, Physical also seems like a show that would love to be about aerobics at least some of the time, the way a group aerobics class can feel like a church, the way it feeds Sheila’s disease even as it soothes her need for control.

And even saying that feels bad because Physical already has so much shame to go around and so little sense of how to anchor it to anything other than white-hot loathing.

It’s painful to add more shame to the pile, but Physical is nothing if not a testament to bottomless bad feelings.

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