In  “Cary & Brooke Go to an AIDS Play,” the fifth episode of the third and final season of Comedy Central/HBO Max/Max’s cult hit sitcom The Other Two, Cary Dubek (Drew Tarver) is desperate. A few episodes prior, he started dating Lucas Lambert Moy (Fin Argus), an extreme method actor who, ever since the two have gotten together, has taken on a series of roles in which his characters can’t have sex. The most recent of these roles is that of an HIV positive gay man in the aptly titled 8 Gay Men With AIDS: A Poem in Many Hours, a multi-day play whose interminability becomes the episode’s running joke, and only exacerbates Cary’s sexual frustration. 

But there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel: Lucas’ manager tells Cary that Adam McKay wants Lucas to play a gay pornstar in his next film, a role that Cary sees as his only chance at sexual relief. But after a series of sitcom hijinks involving a stolen phone, Lukas Gage (of White Lotus fame, playing himself), who it turns out shares a manager with Cary’s boyfriend, is cast instead. This leads to a standoff between Cary and Gage, who is also at the play. After failing to cajole him into giving up the role, Cary meets Gage in the lobby during one of the play’s many intermissions. After Gage tells Cary he’s going to leave the neverending play early, Cary decides to invoke the nuclear option.

“I’ll tweet that you left,” he tells Gage, holding up his iPhone like it’s a switch that could detonate the entire theater. ““I’ll tweet that I saw you, Lukas Gage, walking out of the AIDS play.” 

Gage stops dead in his tracks. He looks between the freedom of the theater door and the loaded gun that is Cary’s drafted tweet. With a slightly insane look in his eye, he walks back in for the next act.

Outside of being a very funny comedy set piece, this scene encapsulates The Other Two’s central critique of modern society – that we are governed, first and foremost, by our public image, and that social media is the tool through which we tailor that image to emphasize our own best qualities and the worst qualities of others. The question of whether or not Lukas Gage walking out of the AIDS play is the right or wrong thing to do is immaterial – Cary can make it look like it was wrong, and that alone is enough to destroy Gage’s career. The central concern – about how things “look,” not about what they actually are – feeds the drive and conflict of Cary and his sister, Brooke (Helené Yorke) as they try to carve out careers separate from those of their wildly successful pop star brother Chase (Case Walker) and talk show host mother Pat (Molly Shannon). But that drive overtakes their practical life goals – instead of chasing love and a career, they chase how they think love and a career would make them look to people other than themselves. For their troubles, they only end up unhappy, albeit in distinct ways.

Cary, once a put upon striver, morphs from a struggling actor into a monster consumed purely by his desire to attain fame. For most of the series, Cary’s drive to become a successful actor was framed as a familiar show biz dream – but in the third season, it’s revealed to be much more petty and superficial, a measuring stick that he uses to judge himself against other people, primarily his friend and former coworker Curtis (Brandon Scott James). Even after scoring success with the movie Night Nurse and the streaming series Windweaver, Cary still feels insecure in his standing, and ends up compromising his values to attain more fame. Perhaps his most shameful moment comes when he accepts the role of sentient blob Globby in Disney’s Haunted Buddies franchise, a role that briefly turns him into a hero of gay representation until both GLAAD and the Westboro Baptist Church leave the premiere disappointed that the “exclusively gay moment” Globby appears in merely involved him laying in bed with another glob (“if Globby was straight … then he’d be in bed with a human woman” a Disney executive explains). As often happens in real life, both Cary and Disney are thirsting after the effects of something, but not the thing itself. In Cary’s case he’s less interested in doing the work of an actor and making an actual change than he is in basking in the undeserved praise and media attention, much like how Disney (and other studios) wants plaudits for gay representation while expending minimal effort.

In fact, receiving that praise and attention, even from the least noteworthy sources, quickly becomes Cary’s raison d’être. In “Brooke Hosts a Night of Undeniable Good,” Cary takes a last minute trip to his high school reunion in Ohio after he finds out Windweaver has become a hit, and at first, it’s everything he dreamed it would be. He’s the life of the party, lauded by people whose approval, for whatever reason, he desperately seeks. But once the party’s over he finds himself empty and alone, barely coasting off the highs of the reunion by liking every Instagram story he’s tagged in, and eventually ends up falling face first in an adult diaper soaked with his own urine in a gas station bathroom. This humiliation is paralleled by another gay man returning from a similarly triumphant but empty high school reunion, and both end up receiving FaceTime calls from former classmates. The Cary parallel realizes what the audience realizes as well – both of these people are empty because they’ve valued success and notoriety over friendship. And just as the other man turns to Cary to ask if he’d like to get a drink, Cary dashes off and calls his agent, sure of what will finally make him happy – winning, as his high school yearbook predicted he would, an Oscar.

Brooke, for her part, is after an ostensibly more high minded, but equally nebulous, goal – she wants to “do good.” After finding out that she transported a decoy thumb drive that she believed contained an exclusive picture of Chase’s armpit cross country, Brooke quits her job as a manager to commit herself to a life of service. Of course, her motivations are far from pure. Rather than being energized by a specific injustice or cause, she’s instead jealous of the positive attention heaped onto her boyfriend Lance (Josh Segarra), who left the fashion industry to become a nurse after the pandemic. After founding her own short lived non-specific non-profit and a few unsatisfying weeks of planting trees in The Bronx, Brooke rejoins Chase and Pat’s management team, and looks for ways to do good through the entertainment industry. As with her other endeavors, this reveals more flaws in her character than merits. While producing a mental health awareness telethon starring Chase, she actively covers up sexual harassment, flouts COVID protocol, and kowtows to a homophobic therapy app CEO, all in the service of making the event run smoothly so she can look “good.” Just like Cary, it’s not the action itself that matters to Brooke, but how people interpret her actions – the need to appear to be doing good instead of doing good itself.

But whatever ethical lines Brooke may cross during the telethon, it (temporarily) pays off. The telethon gets Brooke nominated for a Peabody Award, but that, too, goes belly up when: it becomes public that Chase included a free therapy session with a purchase of his new album, thereby profiting off of mental illness and Pat accidentally tweets out a series of classist and sexually explicit messages that were meant to be texts. While literally moments away from receiving an award for goodness, Brooke decides to take a bullet for her family, joining a live newscast and claiming that she’s responsible for both the therapy scheme and the texts. Chase and Pat save face by letting Brooke take the heat and firing her shortly thereafter, but Brooke’s dreams of being officially “good” are thwarted once again.

But in volunteering to look bad, Brooke learns that she has, in fact, learned what it means to be good. Her kamikaze mission to save her clients actually nets her new business because, if celebrities need anything, it’s a fall person. By indicating she’s willing to take a reputational hit on behalf of her family, Brooke finally learns what it is to be truly good – namely, it requires selfishness, and it doesn’t require public recognition. Instead, one’s goodness is a private thing, and something that can only truly be appreciated by those closest to you. Brooke’s status as a quasi-public figure, and her daily dealings with very public figures, distorts this view of goodness – and it’s only by sacrificing for her family (and, it’s implied, reaping from it financially) that she realizes what she’s actually after.

Cary comes to a similar realization as well. Instead of attending the Peabody ceremony, he storms off to the Hamptons to confront his agent to demand an update on a film he’s sure will land him an Oscar nomination. While there, he realizes the reason she hasn’t been answering her phone, and the reason she’s been in the Hamptons instead of the city with Cary, is because she’s caring for her sick mother. Chastened by his own lack of empathy, Cary visits and tries to make amends with Curtis, whose success he had become jealous of, and ends up staying in the Hamptons for a week, reading and self-reflecting. Eventually he comes across an actor he’d starred alongside in an episode of the network procedural Emily Overruled and joins him, his partner, and their friends for dinner. Like Brooke, he’s finally learned that the search for public adoration is not a satisfying one, and that it’s the personal connections built through that striving that provide one with true value.

While The Other Two is the story of two people working in the entertainment industry, these conflicts between public recognition and personal satisfaction have become a key facet of the attention economy in which nearly every human being is either a willing or unwilling participant. Social media has truly given every person the opportunity to become a celebrity or entertainer themselves, and with that power comes an immense amount of anxiety about how to build one’s brand or following, or indeed even if building that brand or following is necessary. The Other Two doesn’t discount the realities of the modern attention economy – in fact, as an entertainment product, it is directly dependent on them – but it does remind us that it’s a poor measure of true worth. Fans, views, followers – these are all ephemeral things, and they won’t keep you warm at night. It’s best to treat them as the professional inconvenience that they are, and hope, as you deal with them, you meet some people worth hanging onto along the way.