Indie-TV project The Long Long Night is a mostly delightful two-dude show

Mark Duplass looks, and sounds, so natural when captured on a regular old—or at least relatively affordable—device, be it a Zoom call on a laptop (as he is in Language Lessons), a camcorder (when he’s alongside Joshua Leonard, with their straight characters trying and failing to make a sex tape together in writer-director Lynn Shelton’s fantastic friendship comedy Humpday), or any number of cameras dating back to The Puffy Chair, the low-budget film that put him and his brother, Jay, on the map in the mid-2000s, and including the found-footage horror feature Creep, which spawned a sequel and a TV show. If some bands—like, say, Times New Viking, since the 2000s are on the brain—just sound better and most in their element in lo-fi mode, Duplass seems very at home recording a video message on his iPhone while walking down the street.

In The Long Long Night—a TV project that’s played at the Tribeca and SXSW film festivals, and is now available on the indie-film platform Kinema—the actor does a whole lot of that. Written and directed by Barret O’Brien (who grew up with Duplass in New Orleans), the comedy is essentially a two-dude show, with the pair playing longtime best friends who make a series of pacts to, they hope, better themselves and the world. In a self-recorded video in the show’s opening minutes, Carroll (O’Brien) and Pete (Duplass) explain that they became vegans to help the environment, gave up watching porn because of that industry’s treatment of women, and have now decided to take a big plunge that is best left unspoiled here to do their part for our dying planet. 

It’s a solid and pretty funny premise—two well-intentioned guys getting in over their heads and arguing a whole lot about it while they remain unnoticed, the world basically shrugging in response to their efforts—and it’s a dynamic O’Brien spells out from the jump by quoting both Homer (“I’m eager to do it, whatever I can do…whatever can be done”) and Homer Simpson (“Stupidity got us into this mess, and stupidity will get us out”). On the titular evening in question, one of the guys backs out of the agreement, and the show’s six, twentyish-minute episodes cut between that night (shot in black and white) and and their lives six months later (shot in color) as the now-distant friends leave a series of video messages for each other, with Pete spiraling existentially and getting all scruffily unkempt and aggressive and Caroll landing a normal job, looking clean-cut, and pretending everything is fine in his “sorry I missed you” replies.