When we meet Mel, the heroine of the new Hulu/Onyx Collective comedy How to Die Alone , she is living an existence that only a masochist might choose. She works at JFK Airport, driving a cart around the terminal to ferry passengers on their way to the kinds of trips she wishes she could take but knows that she can’t, both because she’s broke and terrified to fly. She has to come to work every day alongside her ex, Alex, a seemingly perfect guy whom she pines after, even though she’s the one who ended the relationship, for reasons she can barely understand, much less articulate. By day, she is surrounded by people, but always feels alone. By night, she is simply alone — which is how she winds up clinically dying for three minutes on her birthday, due to a mishap with a DIY furniture cabinet she is assembling by herself after her best friend Rory blows off their planned celebration.
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How to Die Alone is the story of how Mel uses this near-death experience as a catalyst to reshape her solitary life into one she might actually enjoy, and the many mistakes she makes along the way. And it’s an impressive effort from its creator and star Natasha Rothwell, who plays Mel.
Rothwell’s versatile. She was a writer on Insecure , and frequently that show’s funniest on-camera presence as Issa and Molly’s unfiltered friend Kelli. She was the emotional heart of the first season of White Lotus as Belinda the masseuse, a character who made such an impression that Mike White is bringing her back for the anthology satire’s third season. She’s written for SNL , gets laughs whenever she appears in the Sonic the Hedgehog films, and is a welcome presence pretty much anywhere she appears.
How to Die Alone , though, is by far her biggest showcase for her own vision, rather than her helping to execute other people’s ideas. It is her demonstrating her strengths as writer and performer, as both comedian and dramatic actress, and it’s extremely satisfying.
Mel’s accident with the cabinet is played at first for black comedy: even after she’s revived, doctors in the hospital get stuck on the fact that she nearly choked to death on Crab Rangoon, and need Mel to settle an argument about what exactly the dish is. But it’s also treated as the traumatic experience that it obviously would be to her, and the eight-episode debut season nimbly dances back and forth between the event’s sillier ramifications and its more poignant ones. It reshapes her friendship with Rory (Conrad Ricamora), forces her to reassess her breakup with Alex (Jocko Sims), creates new friction with her estranged brother Brian (Bashir Salahuddin), and leads to both healthy choices (making non-work friends) and very poor ones (committing minor fraud).
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The comedy comes mostly from the intricate world Rothwell depicts within the bowels of JFK. Almost any item Mel needs — luggage, drugs, even a $4,000 “investment ham” — can be found in one of the confiscation rooms, and friendly baggage handler Terrance (KeiLyn Durrel Jones) can seemingly hook her up with the rest. There’s also an amusingly petty rivalry between Mel and Patti (Michelle McLeod) who sits at the desk next to Alex, and H. Jon Benjamin has a fun recurring role as the resident “bird man,” who uses a pet falcon to try to prevent other birds from striking planes as they take off and land.
Within that quirky but largely down-to-earth world, Rothwell adds some fanciful elements. Mel has an overactive imagination. At times, it manifests as her imagining herself as other people throughout the airport — always people who seem more fulfilled and confident — while at others, we get full-blown musical numbers. As it turns out, Rothwell can sing just as well as she can sling a joke or play the raw emotion of a scene. And there are some genuinely raw moments throughout the season, albeit never to the point where the show becomes oppressively sad. Mel’s life isn’t what she wants it to be, and Rothwell wants to be honest about how that would feel, and how hard it would be emotionally to find a way out of that, but the tonal balance feels just about right.
Television shows are by their very nature collaborative. Rothwell wears multiple hats on this series, but she’s working in tandem with directors, crewmembers, and other writers and actors. She is not alone in the way the character she plays here feels. Still, after seeing her work so well for others in other series, it’s nice to see how well she can do when she sets out on her relative own like this.
The first four episodes of How to Die Alone begin streaming September 13 on Hulu, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all eight episodes.
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