What I’m Watching: Casual

Casual: Season 4, Episode 4 “Dreams Stay With You” (B+)

Things definitely aren’t casual on this show anymore, with a few relationships taking some extremely serious steps from which its members won’t quickly be able to recover. The most drastic revelation was the news that Leia wasn’t actually pregnant, something that unearthed a problematic issue in her marriage with Leon, which is that she doesn’t actually want kids. That whole relationship has been a side plotline for a while, and I think we might be headed towards a breakup that’s going to ripple out to our two main adult characters in a way they’re not expecting. Alex’s hallucinatory experience gave him a puzzling message from his dead dad, played to perfection as always by Fred Melamed, and what he took away from it was that he had to stop messing around and tell Rae how he feels, information that clearly didn’t have the impact he was hoping it would. Laura, never one to see anything through, walked out on her job for good reason since her boss is a monster, and maybe this revenge cooking show will actually work out. As Val’s wine shop looks less and less likely, her relationship prospects with an increasingly sympathetic John are looking better, and the sudden reappearance of an unfortunate ex only helped to show her that what she’s close to having now may actually be exactly what she’s been looking for all along. With four episodes still to go in this show’s run, I wouldn’t count on anything we see right now working out smoothly, but I’m definitely fascinated by where it’s all going.