Physical Series-Premiere Recap: Desperate Housewife

Also, was it a good thing for him to suggest a rational amount of sweets right before bed, or was it a bad thing that he was so hyper-focused on being “good” in the first place? In that moment, I felt compelled to stop and parse and analyze ad infinitum.

I am not sure yet how I feel about Physical, and especially how I feel about Sheila, Rose Byrne’s self-loathing, dissatisfied vortex of an everywoman.

However, I do know this: I have never seen an interior monologue on such teeming, unsparing display as Sheila’s is here.

Before anything can happen, we now see Sheila staring into a bathroom mirror, silently berating herself for the zit on her face, and we learn that we’ve jumped back to 1981… except was anyone else convinced it was actually, like, mid-to-late ’70s? The louche clothes, the wood-and-wallpaper decor, the soundtrack, the getting-high-and-angling-for-a-threesome hedonism all looked very Boogie Nights/American Hustle.

Afterwards, you will have a veggie pita from the place next door and no chips and no soda… None of these things are particularly hard to do.

It feels like someone crept into my house in the middle of the night and stole some prized personal possession, one that I hadn’t thought about in years but still felt very core to my being, and then I woke up and turned on AppleTV+ and there it was.

The funny thing is that, as a viewer, I feel compelled to want to know where Sheila’s self-hatred comes from, but as a person, I know that treating yourself badly doesn’t have to specifically come from anywhere; in modern society, self-loathing is practically in the ether.

She checks into a seedy motel and, like many people do when they check into seedy motels in the middle of the day, she engages in a most illicit affair: She strips down, spaces the food out on the bed just so, and she goes to town.

I have never experienced bulimia, but I have fallen into unhealthy episodes that ended with me telling myself it’ll never happen again, and I have shoved food into my face behind the wheel and stashed away the wrappers.

He claims all of her ideas as his own, even telling her at one point, “You are the bass line underneath the melody, undetectable at times.” Gah.

That’s the name of the aerobics studio at the mall where VW Rabbit lady is an instructor, and that name is just too perfect.

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