C'est 40

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There’s only so much energy out there for “Woe is me” stories, especially when the guy at the center of that story is Me. Maybe it’s I, depending on your chosen method of translating French or how faithful you are to caption labeling. 

You’ll find Me (Kyan Khojandi) at the heart of “bref.” He was the down-on-his-luck protagonist through 82 episodes of the show’s past incarnation as a short-form comedy. Beginning in 2011, “bref.” (French for “anyway”) followed Me through all the bite-sized absurdities of hitting middle age. Fiery relationships, volatile friendships, and the usual ups and downs that come from figuring out life mostly on your own.   

In a season that came out earlier this year, “bref.” switched to a half hour format. The next chapter for Me (stylized on some menus as “bref.2”) is a co-production with Disney+ and is also available on Hulu. Me narrates all of the wild shifts in his life, be they daily absurdities or the kind of full-scale transformations that send that life on a completely different course. Adrift and on the brink of 40, the time has come for Me’s full-scale self-assessment. Free-spirited girlfriend? Gone. Best friend? Reexamined. Job situation? Lightly sabotaged.

In any language, we’re not exactly in short supply of stories of unambitious dudes who wade through a tidepool of less-than-ideal life choices. If the clearest summary for your show is a poster of a schlubby guy shrugging, that’s basically an advertisement for its own irrelevance. 

And yet! Little by little, “bref.” takes a chisel to the calcified husk of a genre and finds something still alive underneath those layers. “bref.” — co-written and -directed by Khojandi and Bruno Muschio — moves like a bullet train through Me’s life, somehow flourishing wherever his day-to-day feels static. It’s dreariness at top speed, however this show makes that make sense. 

“bref.” doesn’t just have an expert handling on pacing. It also has a playful imagination. After years of mourning the loss of “Man Seeking Woman,” here’s an unabashedly French version that imagines what might have happened had Josh Greenberg never found the kind of love that came his way by series’ end. (All three of those “Man Seeking Woman” seasons are a few clicks over on Hulu. If it’s not already under the “You May Also Like” tab, the algorithm should be deleted.)

To run through the list of ways that “bref.” blurs reality and brings in a giant stack of other genres to play around with would spoil the fun. But as a representative example, Me imagines a summit with a version of himself from every year of his life. It’s a sequence packed with a lot of different kinds of jokes in one short segment. His younger self is blown away by the older version’s modest dating success. There’s a nod to the last year he hung on trying to stave off obvious baldness. But the button on the scene is a joke about 2020 that’s indicative of what “bref.” gets right in so many other aspects. It doesn’t linger or overemphasize in a way that drills down the punchline into a fine, obvious paste. And it whisks right into the next idea without having to pause for effect. 

As with “Man Seeking Woman,” this show presents the idea that it’s both ridiculous and often counterproductive to put yourself at the center of your own fantastic universe. But sometimes it’s inevitable. Our impulses take us to questionable places. We try to rationalize terrible decisions or find ways out of emotional quagmires by imagining goofy forces controlling our fates. For Me, it’s imagining an old-timey land baron swiping his paycheck or a royal court forcing him to Boar on the Floor for their own enjoyment. They’re maybe not the healthiest coping mechanisms, but “bref.” doesn’t just throw up its metaphorical hands and assume that Me can never change. He has a certain self-awareness that helps the show nudge him toward some more productive epiphanies. 

“bref.” also smartly tiptoes out into Me’s family and friend group. While Me might have extended stretches of tunnel vision, “bref.” doesn’t automatically make that same problem. Me isn’t in isolation while he figures these things out. He’s making changes as a result of how he bounces off the people in his life that he either admires or starts seeing in a very different light. The latter is especially true for his family after a set of surprise circumstances shake up the dynamic between them. (It also offers the chance for squeezing in some period flashbacks and for charting how certain patterns can echo across generations.) There’s also a regular look at Me’s inner friend circle, made up mostly of buddies he’s had his entire adulthood and a revolving door of former romantic interests who have comfortably settled into something else. 

It’s through those friends that “bref.” touches on a particularly profound idea, even in the middle of all the midlife crisis silliness. One of Me’s biggest gradual breakthroughs is slowly realizing how much control he actually has over his own happiness. There’s a season-long thematic idea that the basis of your life is a combination of stuff you retain out of convenience and what you’d proactively choose if you had to start from scratch. The parts of your routine you keep out of fear of having to devote time and energy to building a new one. The joy of discovering something new or familiar that actually brings you fulfillment. And it all leads to figuring out how best to show the people in your life that you love them, as a late-season episode of “bref.” does in a very sweet and understated montage that’s one of the show’s lasting highlights. 

“bref.” can keep a certain feeling of anxiousness and uncertainty about life at 40 while still covering a ton of ground. Me’s evolution is incremental. There isn’t a huge Before and After-style makeover that sees him completely overhauling his diet and his wardrobe and his cultural intake. But each lesson, doled out episode by episode, does do a bit of psychological reframing that unlocks a healthier path. The comedy in “bref.” doesn't come from watching someone fail or delight in his own irrelevance. It’s in watching him tighten his grip on the ways of the past before releasing for good, realizing those old habits were never worth sticking to in the first place. 

If the course of your life is guided by make-or-break moments, as “bref.” argues with its own brand of visual gusto, there’s usually someone on the other side of those. That’s a hard idea to get across in a show that is explicitly told through the lens of one character (played by someone who’s also directing and writing the story as it’s unfolding). Yet, “bref.” is exciting to watch because it’s attacking that paradox as directly as it can. Me starts to put together a core part of reality that the show around him has already figured out: Those moments that cause our lives to fork, that send us hurtling toward futures we hadn’t even imagined, are shaped by people with more influence on our lives than we usually give them credit for. Pretending that life is shaped and enjoyed by a population of one is a surefire way to live life afraid of a neverending cascade of hypotheticals. Watching a show distill all those possibilities and have its central character embrace the power of community, of sharing that life with so many others, is a nice reminder that none of us is as alone as we might assume we are.