‘The Other Two’ Bosses on Cary’s Movie, Brooke & Lance’s Future, Pat’s Career & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Other Two Season 2.]

Season 2 of the hilarious, must-watch comedy ends with the two members of the family who are usually categorized as the “The Other Two” finding success: Brooke (Heléne Yorke) is doing well as manager (and even has a non-family member client!) and Cary (Drew Tarver) is getting ready to start working on a movie, Night Nurse … just as the pandemic hits.

Meanwhile, the others finally see how overworked Pat (Molly Shannon) is with her talk show, game show, and everything else, and Chase (Case Walker) lets his frustrations over not singing known.

Executive producers Sarah Schneider and Chris Kelly discuss where Season 2 left everyone and begin looking ahead to Season 3.

Will there be a time jump to move past the pandemic? Or will there be something with the family quarantined together?

Sarah Schneider: We liked ending on a joke because we liked acknowledging that the world was about to change. Our show is so topical that it felt weird to not even mention it. But we aren’t trying to have the next episode take place in the pandemic. I think we would jump over that as an idea, so no quarantine as a family.

Chris Kelly: We’re parodying the entertainment industry and the culture of the world around us, so it felt weird to [not acknowledge it]. The pandemic has really changed the entertainment industry and the way people audition and work. We had to acknowledge it in order to keep moving forward authentically.

Beth Dubber / HBO Max

Cary is finding success and being recognized for who he is, not who his family is, and that has drawn his focus. Will the pandemic hitting just as he’s about to start his movie change that?

Schneider: It left it open for us to decide what happens next. Obviously, his first day ended up being not his first day, but there’s still a world that it happens, a world that it didn’t happen, a world that it happens in the future and we pick up with him then. We don’t really know exactly what we’re going to do with that. But we like at the same time that nobody was furious that Cary wasn’t on this family vacation. The family got it. Our intention is not to set up any family drama around that.

Kelly: [What’s happening with Cary and his movie] is the ethos of our whole show: There are no clean wins or losses. It’s just all the things you thought would happen don’t always happen exactly the way you thought they would.

Brooke did find some success as a manager though it was also to the detriment of her clients. But she did realize what she had been doing.

Schneider: When we first meet Brooke this season, she’s in a manager costume. She’s playing the part, but not actually being the part. It’s more of a performance. Her whole struggle this season was just wanting to be seen as a legitimate manager and be a legitimate manager in her own right, which by the end we see that she is because Alessia Cara asked her to manage her. That was validating for her to be asked to manage someone other than someone in her family by the end of the season. We don’t know exactly where we’ll pick her up in the next season, but she at least mentally now can see herself as what she was pretending to be at the beginning of the season. We think that’s a nice win for her character.

Greg Endries /HBO Max

What about Pat’s career? Is her first step finding a manager who has zero connection to her?

Kelly: It’s always a combination of trying to write something next that makes authentic sense for the show and the characters, but then not wanting to repeat ourselves. We want to make sure we don’t just do Season 3 and it’s like, she’s got a talk show and she’s going along as normal. What could be the next evolution of her life, her career? But you’re right, that is something we talked about, that the family is so intertwined. Should they not be? We don’t know.

Is Pat figuring out what she wants for herself instead of just diving into everything?

Kelly: Season 1 was all about her year of yes, and then that year of yes led to where she is in Season 2, which is half great, half exhausting. What would it feel like if she was setting boundaries? What would it be like if she had a year of “no thank you”?  She was on the ride, so grateful and excited that everyone was throwing opportunities her way. But what you really want to do — if you have the ability to say yes, no, I don’t think so, maybe this, maybe not that — could be interesting to explore for her.

Greg Endries /HBO Max

Chase just wants to sing, but he also can’t sing, college didn’t work out for him, he had the fashion show…

Schneider: We’ve put him down so many avenues already. We liked keeping it open for him as well. The main takeaway from the end of the second season was that everything has been aired within the family. It’s very clear that Pat’s not happy, that Chase wants to sing. It’s then what everyone does with that information because you can’t just ignore [it]. You can’t really just push Chase to the side and be like “we’ll talk about that later, buddy” anymore. He’s taking agency over his own life for the first time. It’ll be interesting to see what happens from that because you can’t just sweep his wants under the rug anymore.

I especially want to see Brooke and Lance [Josh Segarra] back together after this season.

Schneider: We love them together, too. We liked that Brooke saw herself going down a path she’d been before, which was falling for him again. And she, as a way of self-preservation, stops that from happening, and then obviously she learns that Lance had already taken steps to extricate himself from his relationship. We liked leaving them open-ended, but clearly there is a connection there. They’re going to stay in each other’s life. Exactly how has yet to be seen, but we like them together and we love those actors.

Beth Dubber / HBO Max

Are they both in better places in their own lives to be back together?

Kelly: That’s something we always talk about. It’s a combination of what would the characters actually do if they were real people and then what’s best for the show in terms of interesting drama. Part of the reason they broke up before the series even started was they were in a rut and they weren’t helping each other move forward. Now they’ve separated and both found things they’re interested in. Maybe they would be better together now — I don’t know. But once they’re together, then what?

Schneider: We are interested in the idea that people can be right for each other, but it depends on when. When they were together the first time, they weren’t right for each other, but now that they’re completely different people, maybe they’re better suited in a way that would make them more successful. We’ll keep exploring [that].

Where did you want to take Streeter [Ken Marino] to have him join the family on that vacation after that hospital room scene?

Kelly: We liked that he’s been so desperate to be a part of the family for so long and has maybe been going about it in a way that you feel for him. Pat was like, “That’s an exhausting energy. I don’t like that energy. I don’t want that energy in a partner.” It is telling that the first time he stepped back and put himself second — “This is what you need. This is what your family needs. I will go away. I will let you all go on vacation alone without me.” — that was the most attractive thing he could have done to her. It was only then he felt like an energy you’d want as a partner and in your family. We like that him stopping his own neuroses is what allowed him to get invited on the trip. Ken Marino was so, so lovely and funny and heartbreaking doing that.

Beth Dubber / HBO Max

What’s Streeter and Pat’s relationship status?

Kelly: I think we wrote that as a sign that Pat was going to give him another chance. She does care for him but it just wasn’t the right vibe. He wasn’t giving her what she needed and now he has so there’s hope for them yet.

Is there anything you can tease about Season 3?

Schneider: The big idea behind this season was that Brooke and Cary find their own success a little bit and in doing so leave their family behind and kind of neglect them. We do want to see the perspective shifts. So we have to figure out what the big idea for this season is and then what stories can help us tell them.

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Is there anything that you wanted to include in Season 2 that you scrapped?

Schneider: So much. … We had a whole episode where they ended up going back to Ohio and we ended up not doing that because it didn’t quite fit in.

The Other Two, Season 3, TBA, HBO Max