Few things could be more mortifying to a teenager than having their mom confront them about their sex life.
Exhibit A: She’s staring you down as your bright blue, dolphin-shaped vibrator rests on the dining room table.
This is not going to be a discussion about the birds and the bees. This is a “you’re being reckless” discussion, where all sorts of frustrations start spilling out.
Cue the defensive replies and eventual storming off.
It’s the kind of scenario that might feel familiar to anyone who has ever had an awkward or tense conversation as a parent or a teenager. But it is scenes like this — at turns comedic and uneasy — that ground “Phony,” a new eight-episode series starring Connie Britton and Sam Nivola that premiered Tuesday on Hulu. Britton plays Ellen Cooke, a high school principal and single mother to Sonny (Nivola); the pair have a perfect, loving mother-son relationship. Or so it seems.
“What I really loved about this story is that ultimately for me it feels like a metaphor of what happens between a parent and their child during those teenage years when the teenager is naturally and organically supposed to be separating,” says Britton, adding that it brings to life the psychological and emotional feelings that emerge during that time.
Britton knows from firsthand experience: The 59-year-old is a mother to a teenager and she has played a mom onscreen before, notably in series like “Friday Night Lights,” “Nashville” and the first season of HBO’s anthology series “The White Lotus.” Her résumé is a big reason Nick Paley, the creator and co-showrunner of “Phony,” wanted her to play Ellen.
“She embodies her characters with so much specificity, and she has played moms before,” he says. “She was really excited to take this crazy creative risk and play with that image of herself … people think of her as America’s mom in many ways because of these iconic roles.”
For Nivola, Sonny wasn’t grounded in his experience so much — he began acting professionally before he finished high school. (Nivola, like Britton, was cast in “The White Lotus,” playing Lochlan Ratliff in Season 3. Paley recalls seeing his audition before the season aired.) But the 23-year-old was able to form strong connections on set with his fellow actors playing high schoolers and, most importantly, with Britton.
“I spent a lot of time with Connie, and she started to feel like my mom,” he says.
Paley, whose previous work includes co-writing the 2021 Oscar-nominated film “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” based the series very loosely on his relationship with his mother, who “shares some DNA with Ellen.” In an early scene, Sonny tells his mother that he and Chloe (Mahaela Park), a classmate, have decided to make their romance official.
“I feel like my mom doesn’t like Chloe,” Sonny says in a voiceover. He then asks Ellen, “You like her, right?” She replies, “Do you like her? I like whoever you like.”
“That’s something that my mom has said to me many times, which is like, ‘If you are happy, my opinion does not matter. I just want you to be happy,’” Paley says. “I think that’s a really beautiful, generous thing to offer your kid, as the kid is looking for your opinion on their girlfriend or boyfriend, especially in high school.”
But while Ellen says she’s supportive, the truth may be different, and it’s one of the themes explored in the series, which walks a fine line between mystery and young-adult dramedy.
“She’s trying her best to be communicative of support, but he knows her and can kind of pick out the details that there’s actually something not quite that she loves about Chloe,” Paley says.
Those feelings lead to an argument — Ellen finds the aforementioned dolphin vibrator in Sonny’s bag and confronts him about it and his relationship with Chloe (they’re making plans to be intimate for the first time). Ellen and Sonny’s close-knit bond is suddenly fractured. Sonny drives off to meet Chloe, but he never makes it, instead waking up bruised and bleary-eyed in a hospital bed, having emerged from a weeklong coma after swerving his car into a lake.
He sees best friend Vogel (Maliq Johnson) and Chloe at his bedside, before noticing Ellen, who seems unlike herself. There are subtle visible differences, like her hairline, nose and fingernails. (A photo of Ellen on the back of a Costco card becomes a reference for Sonny. “I do remember in high school occasionally having my mom’s Costco card,” Paley says.)
But it’s her mannerisms that seem to reflect the biggest change — it frightens Sonny. He’s convinced it’s an impostor.
And that’s the show’s central mystery: Is Ellen actually a fraud, or is it all in Sonny’s head? Neither scenario seems impossible in the show, and Sonny goes to lengths to find out what’s true. Ellen’s appearance and actions may signal a shift, but Sonny has also gone through a traumatic accident. There is a real-life medical condition called Capgras syndrome, a disorder that can be triggered by a brain injury where a person believes that someone close to them has been replaced by an impostor.
It was something Paley researched and discussed with the actors: “Sometimes people have it after just a traumatic experience, and it’s been sort of unnerving … to bring the story out and talk to people and find out that actually it’s more common than you would think.”
Britton recalls speaking to a friend who shared that her daughter had a moment where she didn’t believe mom was indeed mom. “It just was so fascinating to hear somebody who had that experience.”
But on the other hand, Ellen’s behavior could be explainable — she’s a mother who has witnessed her only child survive a serious accident that could have easily been tragic.
“She’s totally rattled by it, and I really noticed that difference in her performance,” Nivola says of Britton and her character. “The trick was to take that sort of fear of hers and care and interpret that difference as a sort of malicious difference.”
Paley says this element of the story stems from a childhood phobia about losing his mom and also finding out she had a fraternal twin. “I was pretty young, so it wasn’t odd that she’d withheld it,” he recalls. “But … I found out that it wasn’t an identical twin. And so those two things felt like core sort of feelings and fears when I was growing up, and I wanted to dramatize that feeling a little bit in the show.”
While drama is certainly a core of the show, Paley and co-showrunner Anthony King, whose previous writing credits include “Broad City” and “The Afterparty,” also wanted to provide moments of levity that mirror the awkward experience of growing up.
“I feel very lucky that a lot of the comedy I’ve worked on has not been like the classic setup, punchline kind of comedy,” King says. “I really like character-driven comedy, where almost if you look at the plot, if someone just wrote out what is the story about, it reads like a drama. But the characters are funny. There are specifics and absurdities in it, like the vibrator.”
And when it came time to cast Sonny, it was important that the actor convey that mix of drama and comedy.
“This character was so difficult to cast because I really wanted it to be funny, but not punchline funny,” Paley says. “I knew that later in the season … it would be so intense and dramatic, and it really goes to dark places for the character.”
Paley and casting director Jessica Kelly ultimately felt Nivola had the right mix.
So where are these places Sonny goes and what does he discover about the mystery surrounding his mother? Nivola and Britton are tight-lipped, preferring to let viewers find out for themselves.
“I love the way this show will be constantly pushing the audience to think outside of what they think they know,” Britton says.
However, Paley hints that the season ends with a cliffhanger, leaving open the possibility for more should “Phony” get another season.
“There are resolutions and answers to this current one, but then we launch into a whole new story, which I’m really excited to see people experience,” he says. “I’m very, very excited to just see how people experience that last episode.”
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