Each week on The Rushfield Lunch, I chat with the industry’s best and brightest minds, the people who can try to help me answer a simple question that rattles around my brain in perpetuity: What the hell is everyone doing?
For the latest episode, I broke virtual bread with two people close to home: Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco, the married co-creators of the Apple TV+ comedy series Platonic, starring Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, about two best friends who reconnect after years of estrangement. The show, which just debuted its second season, also happens to employ my sister as one of its executive producers and writers. (Don’t worry, the connections flow both ways: Nick’s brother, Matt, has also written for The Ankler.)
During our enlightening conversation, Stoller (best known for several successful comedies, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors) and Delbanco (a novelist and, briefly, a former journalist who co-created Friends from College with Stoller) discuss what it’s like to explore platonic, grown-up relationships between men and women on screen; how they work together as a married couple and their philosophy on collaboration, and where comedy is in 2025. “It seems like there’s a push back to theatrical for a lot of this stuff,” says Stoller (who also played himself on Rogen’s The Studio for Apple). “So I certainly hope comedy drifts back to theaters because it’s just so fun.”
Watch the full episode above, and stick through to the end to hear what Stoller and Delbanco recommend as part of their suggested Hollywood Syllabus. Past curricula from my esteemed guests, great thinkers with decades of combined experience to share, can be found here.
