Kate Berlant's 'Parmesan' Lands on HBO With a Phone Problem

Kate Berlant's new HBO special "Parmesan" premieres Oct. 16 at 10 p.m. PT on HBO and HBO Max, and its opening confession sets the theme: "My addiction? My phone."

The hour, directed by Doron Hagay, isn't about cheese. It's about what the endless scroll does to a life. With slapstick and performative haughtiness, Berlant mourns the era before cellphones and catalogues the hyper-niche behaviors of online existence — commenting "PARMESAN" to receive a pasta recipe link, covering a baby's face with an emoji, watching videos of "unspeakable violence" to "unwind," like "gorillas fistfighting zookeepers, tourists being eaten by sharks."

"It makes me long for the past, when maybe you'd numb yourself at the local watering hole," Berlant told Variety. "That suddenly feels so quaint. You'd be with your community, and some people would be abusing alcohol in terrifying ways, but at least you'd be together, and you'd be forced to interact with other people."

She sees a possible upside. "There is this loneliness, which is palpable, and I do think it will drive people into community," she said, "because we'll realize that that's what we need."

What does the special actually argue?

The first two words of the hour are "world's ending," but Berlant rejects the pessimist label. "I am not a pessimist, I would say, but I think fear is the appropriate response to the times in which we live, so I would say I have fear," she said. She frames the dread as "the water that we're swimming in right now" — impossible to leave out of an honest hour.

That's also why she prizes live performance. "We are seeing the death of the living arts across all areas of life right now," Berlant said. "So I don't think the special is dark, but I think it acknowledges some of the themes that dominate contemporary life." She dismisses the idea of AI comedians replacing people outright: "It will never die. People are always going to want people."

The phone, though, has done real damage to her own focus. "My focus has been ravaged by this thing, so I have to reorient myself, and it takes a lot of discipline," she said. "I was in school for many years, and I always loved school, and I don't think I could be in school now." She recently finished a six-week social media cleanse, logged back on when the special was announced — "I wanted the dopamine hit" — and deleted it again the same night.

Which joke actually crossed a line?

Not the ones you'd guess. Berlant says she's never chased an edgy reputation: "I've never been drawn to being perceived as edgy, or in doing edgy material. I don't think I've ever thought, 'I went too far.'"

The joke that provoked a real reaction is one about fathers being like a family friend. Mid-performance, Berlant noticed two people leave from the center audience. "And he flipped me off when I said, 'A father is a family friend,'" she recalled. "And then in the lobby, he threw a glass of wine. I touched a nerve, and I was amazed by that." Her read on why: "Probably he's feeling a lot of shame or guilt around his parenting."

Why does she refuse to leave the stage?

"Parmesan" ends with an anti-closer: instead of a big final punchline, Berlant stays on stage while the audience files out. "There's this pressure of doing a big closer, everyone goes ballistic, and you leave. There's something inherently embarrassing about it, because you're reducing yourself to this expectation of the form," she said. Hagay, one of her oldest friends, told her she needed a big closer. Her response, in effect: "It would be funny if I never left."

The move echoes her off-Broadway show "Kate," where she lingered in the lobby before performances with a sign reading "Ignore me." "The same questions and ideas and motifs haunt you for the rest of your life," she said. "I hadn't even considered that for my last show I was in the lobby as everyone came in, and now I'm on stage while everyone leaves."

"Kate" also explains the special's bigger shift. That show, which Berlant says consumed her life for a couple of years, built a fictional persona — including an invented Irish, abusive mother. "Parmesan" is her first fully autobiographical material. Was it harder? "No, it just was the only thing I could do," she said. "So much has changed in my life and in the world. I can't just pick up where I left off."

What's next with John Early?

Berlant starred this year in Early's film "Maddie's Secret," and the pair are now writing for television. "Let's just say we are ready to have a television show, and I'll leave it at that," she said. Earlier attempts didn't happen — pilots that didn't go, and one pilot that died when COVID hit during pre-production. "We are back in the workshop, and we're doing some writing right now," Berlant said. "We have an amazing idea! We would love to make television for the people."

For now, the anti-closer is the test: audiences, she says, have been remarkably respectful. "People are smart. People know what to do."