“Four women a chef, a single mom, an heiress and a job seeker dig into love and work, with a generous side of midlife crises, in pre-pandemic LA.”
On the Verge is a lighthearted comedy with great performances. With its 30-minute-long episodes, the series is an easy-to-binge comedy, that works more like an elongated movie than a series—the fact that the opening images echo the last episode suggests that too.
Justine (played by Delpy herself) is a French chef with her own restaurant Chez Juste, who has been commissioned by her recovering-sex addict of a boss (Giovanni Ribisi) to write a recipe book while raising her son. She is married to a disparaging husband, Martin (Mathieu Demy), an architect, who is having difficulty finding a job in L.A. since relocating there from France. Elisabeth Shue plays Anne, a clothing designer, who likes to smoke a little marijuana. Living in her Venice house, bought by her mother, Anne appears to have the perfect life, with her German au pair who never seems to be doing anything, but Anne is about to separate from her husband. Ell (Alexia Landeau) is a single mother of three children, all from different men, who is struggling to hold down a job, finding goofy schemes instead to make money. And Yasmin (Sarah Jones) is a stay-at-home mother, trying to restart her career in politics. A feminist with a son she named Orion, she is prone to panic attacks.
The series was filmed in Los Angeles between the first and second waves of the pandemic.
