Joe Pera Talks With You - Episodes 3.7 & 3.8 "Joe Pera Shows You How To Keep Functioning In Mid-Late Winter" and "Joe Pera Talks With You About Legacy"
Written by Nathan Min, Jo Firestone and Conner O'Malley
Directed by Marty Schousboe

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

I spent three weeks in southern Michigan, mostly outside and briefly in Detroit, in 2019, and it was a gorgeous, welcoming place but I was also there in August and September. I fully recognize that living on a lake would have been hell if my stay had begun two months later. The closest I've been to the mid-winter desolation Joe guides us through in "Joe Pera Shows You How To Keep Functioning In Mid-Late Winter" was in college, during the 2010 "snowmageddon" in Washington, D.C., when all of my classes were canceled for a week and a few parts of campus collapsed under the weight of all of the snow. I had lived in the Bay Area and Seattle and was as unprepared to trudge to the grocery store in knee-deep snow as the glass and metal canopy in the middle of my school was to carry it.

But that's the thing-- Washington expected snow, just nowhere near that much. I cannot relate to living in a place where you're just prepared to stay inside for at least a season. When you live in a place like Marquette, or Joe Pera's actual hometown, Buffalo, you spend a chunk of the year adapting.

Marquette (or at least the Marquette of this show, which doesn't feel all that fanciful) is such a specific place to set a TV show that I sometimes forget the Joe Pera Talks With You crew is using it for more than its natural beauty. That weather leads to introspection, it leads to loneliness, it leads to alcoholism. It also leads to people watching football with their families and skiing-- I'm not going to pretend everybody who lives north of New York City crawls up their own asses and becomes Henry David Thoreau every January. But, in the grand tradition of "the city is almost another character in the story," Marquette is presented here as both participating factor in and cure to the Joe Pera character's problems. If you want to get some exercise, you’ve got to walk around the edge of the Superior Dome. But you also get to meet up with your friend Bugsy for your pseudo-documentary and watch the glow in the distance, where you can tell the sunrise is happening behind the clouds.

In the first episode of the night, Joe watches that sunrise and Gene’s campaign video for President of The World. Sarah meets back up with the wine moms for a ski trip. There’s a DragonBall Z reference that killed me and I can’t describe it because the joy is how unexpected it’s source is and if you can see it for yourself, I’m not going to step on the moment.

The loneliness of the show gets highlighted here, but it’s primarily highlighted in Sarah’s initial inability to connect with the wine moms. One of them excitedly recounts meeting Betsy DeVos and Sarah goes off, explaining all the ways her job as a public school teacher is jeopardized by Michigan’s narcissistic neo-con daughter.

That’s a special thing. It’s easy to express loneliness through emptiness, and that’s here visually (and done terrifically) but the core of it all is in Joe feeling awkward around other teachers, the Melskys separating for the better part of a season and Sarah feeling angry at her new friends for not being more aware and at herself for being unable to successfully ski down a mountain and let off some steam. Marquette in mid-winter isn’t a place with big crowds running around open fields. It forces everybody into small spaces, and the alienates become even more aware of how they feel when confronted with a closeness that should and maybe could exist naturally. You can’t express all of that if you’re the thousandth show this year to shoot in LA or New York.

Also, when the snow caved in American University’s canopy, an improv troupe made a terrible sketch video about it, and I don’t think that kind of thing would happen in Marquette because they would have expected the snow and built a sturdier canopy. The sketch played regularly, for the next two years, on TVs around campus. The canopies in Marquette are reinforced, sturdy forever. Heaven is a place on Earth.

In the second episode, Joe gets his own wine mom ski trip, watching football with Mike Melsky and his family (played by Conner O’Malley’s real family). The Melsky boys rib each other, which leads to Conner O’Malley yelling “You know that I would nuke LA if I had the chance! I will murder you!” It’s a perfect piece of television.

Conner looks relatively normal here as Mike Melsky, but he’s still wild. His physical look is just always severe. I watched him sitting next to his partner, Aidy Bryant, in a clip from the Emmys and seeing him as a normal person was jarring. When you catch him live, he’s half-hunched over, holding himself like every second of life is pain.

He’s the perfect foil for Joe, spasming and screaming as the most gentle persona on TV narrates his own life. Conner’s Mike is almost like the rest of the world confronting Joe’s Joe. It’s a loud, irrational mess and you can’t get a great read on it. You just kind of smile and hope that at some point you’re let in on the rhythms. Joe Pera Talks With You is a show about being on the outside, happily trying to get on the inside. Mike Melsky makes for an always-startling peek inside.

Joe’s taking his comfort where he can get it. He’s been trying to sell his Nana’s house around the edges of the past few episodes. Next week, we get two last episodes and the season finishes, and I’m going to spend the the time until then preparing to get emotionally devastated by that plot wrapping up.
I also wanted to take a moment to highlight Mary Houlihan’s title cards, included throughout this write-up. I highly recommend her Patreon, which she uses to send monthly zines. I’m always happy to get them in the mail. Here’s a link to that. And here’s my favorite title card of the season, so far: