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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My husband and I both struggled in season 2 with how incredibly unlikeable Jack (Will Forte) was. They kind of redeemed him by the end but it was hard to get to that point.

I get that the idea was that he was grieving his friend, but they all lost a friend. His pushiness in wanting everyone to grieve the same way reminded me of people in my real life and it was so irritating -- the narcissism of deciding your feelings are everyone's feelings and if they can't get on board with how you are expressing your feelings, it must be because their feelings are wrong.

Also it was extremely on point that he was the most insane about Covid precautions but then his insanity resulted in them all getting Covid. Tracks, that happened in our friend bubble too![/quote]

I think Jack was just sort of a doormat in season 1 so they needed to give him some texture.  I found his need to have peolel grieve in a specific way to be realistic and fitting his character but what was irritating was everyone else’s inability to validate that feeling and then say “that’s not right for me though.”  But I guess it made sense in the context of Tina fey’s character having a pathological need to avoid upsetting  or emotional conversations.  He has basically accommodated that their whole lives by being the easy going one, emotionally, so then when he hits a rough spot, that dynamic doesn’t work.  And I think nicks death hit him harder because it was clear that was his only friend and Nick was sort of his “cool guy North Star” friend.  The other couple have all their fabulous gay friends that they keep mentioning.

The whole show was basically about how the habits you’ve developed over decades can fall apart in middle age, for various reasons.  Each one of the couples had a dynamic that was shown to be dysfunctional in season 1 and in season 2 they had to basically rearrange that dynamic.  (With anne, it was her utter dependency on Nick —when Nick died, she replaced him with his gf/baby and became their caretaker … then realized this is f—ed up and I don’t even really remember who I was before I started down that path.). [/quote]

The most unlikeable Jack episode was the Covid flashback episode though, before Nick died. It shows that he was actually not chill at all before Nick died -- he had extreme anxiety and could make weird and unsupportable choices in service to his anxiety. There's actually this great parallel between his behavior in that episode and his story arc for the season. In the Covid episode, he is the one suffering from extreme Covid anxiety, even considering sleeping in the car because he's so afraid to be inside around other people. He's obsessive about their Covid rituals like reading the poem every night, and while Tina Fey's character is supportive of this because she can see he needs it, you can also see that it's not what she needs and he doesn't really seem interested in what she needs. Then when they all start getting Covid his first instinct is to blame everyone else for breaking quarantine, until his daughter points out that he was the one who broke quarantine to get all those Covid tests, and he went to a clinic full of sick people to get them.

This is similar to what happens in the aftermath of Nick's death, with his grief making it impossible for him to see that others are also grieving but in their own way. He's once again being ruled by his emotions (this time grief and anger instead of anxiety) and Tina Fey is again focused on trying to give him what he needs. Her own needs get pushed to the back burner and when she does start to assert herself a bit during the summer episodes, it leads to him suggesting the "free balling" approach where they basically live separate lives. He is then a complete jerk at Thanksgiving (he doesn't even shower after his run or change out of his sweaty clothes???) has a huge meltdown and throws the turkey (ostensibly because he's mad at Danny for something Danny didn't even do, but actually because he just has unprocessed grief that is coming out as rage), and then becomes obsessed with everyone being mad at him for it even though they are all very forgiving.

And even then, Tina Fey focuses on what he needs, pushing him to do the marathon and recognizing that he uses physicality to work through emotions. Yes, it's nice when he pushes her to really express her own fears to him and he is very receptive and they come together at the end. But by the time that happens, he's spent he entire season focused pretty much entirely on his own emotions, behaving like a selfish child, and just generally being hard to deal with. [/quote]

I like a lot of the ideas in this thread but will push back on this one. Tina Fey's character thinks she is being supportive but she's actually not because she keeps pushing Jack to get past grief and interrupts him whenever he tries to explain to get how he's really feeling. She's basically telling him to bottle up his true emotions and just act more happy. You can't exactly blame her for his blow ups, but perhaps if he was allowed to actually talk about and process how he feels he wouldn't get to that point.[/quote]

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