When the first season of Netflix’s Firefly Lane ended, best friends Kate and Tully were no longer speaking, but we weren’t yet sure why. The show is back for the first half of it’s second and final season, and, fair warning: you’re not going to get all the answers about their falling out you’re looking for just yet. But you’re still going to get plenty of time jumps full of ’80s references.
FIREFLY LANE: SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: It’s 1975. A letter addressed to Tully Hart, who is living in Seattle, with a return address from her best friend Kate Mularkey of Firefly Lane. The girls have been living in different towns for five months and miss each other desperately, and as the scene goes on, they both exchange letters back and forth updating each other on their young high school lives.
The Gist: While the opening scene this season features the younger versions of Kate and Tully deeply dedicated to their friendship despite living apart, we’re soon shuffled over to 2005, to a point in time that picks up immediately following the season one finale. Kate (Sarah Chalke) is attempting to be a good hostess at her father’s funeral, but the only thing anyone wants to talk to her about is her falling out with Tully (Katherine Heigl). Kate’s daughter Marah (Yael Yurman) comforts her, reminding her of how great a friend Tully was a year prior, when Kate’s ex-husband Johnny is injured by an IED in Iraq while reporting from the war zone there. We jump back to that moment in 2004, as a frantic Kate can’t find her passport or a flight to Germany where Johnny is going to be treated, so Tully charters a jet for Kate to get there. Once they’re in Germany, Kate sits at Johnny’s bedside, his prognosis unknown, pouring her heart out to him while he’s unconscious, telling him she loves him and doesn’t want to separate.
The show jumps back to 1985 to show the early stages of Kate and Johnny’s relationship, which Tully knows about, since she’s Kate’s roommate and can hear all the sex from behind her wall, but which is still an office secret, or so Kate thinks. The intern who works with the two women, Lottie (India de Beaufort), is essentially a mini-Kate, nerdy and awkward, ogles Johnny from behind her huge glasses making her crush on him widely known. At one point she confronts Kate in the office bathroom, revealing that Kate and Johnny’s relationship is actually public knowledge, and she congratulates Kate on wearing Johnny down to the point that he would settle for her. Then she says that Kate gives geeks like her hope for nailing a hottie like Johnny, calling Kate “the patron saint of mousy wallflowers.” Kate is devastated at Lottie’s backhanded comments, but when she asks Johnny if she really did wear him down, he denies it, calling her too good for him, before seducing her in the office control room.
Over in Tully-flashback-world, we see younger Tully struggling with her mother, Cloud (Beau Garrett), and we jump from 1975 to 1985 to see all the ways the Cloud has ignored and taken advantage of Tully, but each time Cloud does something cruel, when Tully reaches out to Kate for comfort, Kate isn’t there for her. She’s either throwing a make-out party or, you know, having sex with Johnny in the office control room. This episode sets up Tully to be the giver, she gives her mother her love but it’s not reciprocated. She gives Kate her friendship, and Kate is too boy-crazy to pay attention when Tully needs her the most. Still, Tully continues to give, all the way into adulthood when she pays for Kate’s flight to Germany, and while she’s there, she buys two keychains fashioned to look like German beer steins, and the two women toast to their friendship with their tiny steinys.
As the women sit by Johnny’s bedside in a German hospital, he finally awakens to explain to them what happened when he was ambushed by Iraqi insurgents, explaining that his colleague Charlie was there, but that he hasn’t seen Charlie since the explosion. Kate is so grateful that Johnny is alive, so when Johnny’s colleague, Charlie, who is not a man but a stunning woman walks into the hospital room, Kate is confused. Because Charlie is actually Charlotte, who actually used to go by Lottie. Lottie. The mousy former intern who lusted after Johnny 20 years earlier, who has turned into a very sexy mouse in 2004. And Charlie and Johnny are more than just colleagues. Kate stares in disbelief.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The strong female friendship between the women of Firefly Lane is reminiscent of the ones on shows like Dead To Me and a show you’ve probably never heard of called Hindsight, which aired for one season on VH1 and is now available on Amazon Prime Video, which was so much better than you’d expect of a scripted dramedy that aired for one season on VH1. The drama, tragedy and time jumps of Firefly Lane are also a perfect substitute if you’re missing This Is Us.
Our Take: Firefly Lane can be a little maudlin at times, but it’s your classic tragicomic best friend story along the lines of Beaches and Dead To Me. In fact, now that the final season of Dead To Me has aired, it’s very hard not to compare the two shows, they share a lot of similar themes (mysterious car wrecks, on-again, off-again friendships, looming death), but where that series was darkly comic and acerbic, Firefly Lane is, by comparison, more earnest, the nostalgia of the flashbacks creates a deeper sentimentality about the women’s friendship. If Dead To Me was made for sardonic Gen Xers, Firefly Lane was made for mawkish Boomers.
Still, there’s something enjoyable about the show despite it’s obvious and kind of generic flaws (Kate is nerdy just because she wears enormous glasses!), and the structure of the time jumps and the mystery (I feel like that word should have air quotes, since the “mystery” we’re talking about is “why are these two not speaking?” and not like, “where did these dead bodies in a shipping container come from?”) is only addressed incrementally. The show is making us wait for the payoff, but in getting there, however slowly, it feels like it will all be worth it. There are also new characters this season that will certainly add to the drama. There’s Charlie, who will obviously give Kate something to worry about, as well as Justine (Jolene Purdy), an agent plotting to woo Tully, and Danny (Ignacio Serricchio), a rival reporter that Tully kissed once, who keeps popping up into her life unexpectedly. The biggest gripe fans will likely have with the season is that, since it’s split into two parts, they can binge the first nine episodes now, but will have to wait till 2023 for the rest.
Sex and Skin: There’s a bunch of implied and obscured sex happening off camera, but it all remains pretty PG-13.
Parting Shot: The big question that episode one still doesn’t answer for us is why Kate is so angry with Tully that she has cut her out of her life in the present day. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the show’s final scene which flashes six months forward, after Kate and Tully’s trip to see Johnny in the hospital. Police lights flash, glass is shattered, someone has been in a car crash. We don’t know the who, what, where of it all, but before the episode fades to black, the camera zooms in on a tiny beer stein keychain dangling from the ignition.
Sleeper Star: Katherine Heigl as Tully is really the anchor of the show, at least early in this season. She’s going through a lot of bullshit: she’s being sued for millions for breaking her talk show contract, yet she’s still giving all her money to Kate to go visit Johnny. She’s trying to come to grips with the ways that her mother has shaped her, yet she’s still trying to be a noble and decent person, the opposite of hr absentee parent. And she sells it. She’s tremendously wealthy and famous, and yet she’s kind and accessible and even vulnerable, which helps us root for her even when Kate has sworn her off.
Most Pilot-y Line: “You guys wanna go see that Madonna movie tonight?” We get it, we’re time jumping to the 1980s! But more importantly, that movie has a name, it is called Desperately Seeking Susan, throw some respect, people.
Our Call: STREAM IT! Firefly Lane can be soapy and sappy, but it’s a fun ride full of humor and high stakes relationship drama. Heigl and Chalke are invested in their characters and they sell the friendship at the heart of the story, which means that the ending (since this is based on a book series, I assume you all know that – spoiler alert! – someone dies in the end) will pack a real emotional punch.
