The Indignity and Joy of Starting Over After a Breakup (2025)

If you’ve watched a Netflix original in the past few years, you might recognize the comedian Michelle Buteau as the platform’s punchiest voice of reason. At the beginning of the 2019 breakup comedy Someone Great, Buteau’s character delivers a brisk self-esteem boost to the film’s protagonist, whom she encounters as a crying stranger on a subway platform: “Why he won’t try? Look at you with your pretty teeth and shit.” In Randall Park and Ali Wong’s Always Be My Maybe, released about a month later, Buteau played Veronica, the very pregnant and very funny assistant to Wong’s celebrity restaurateur, Sasha. And since 2020, Buteau has hosted The Circle, a chaotic Big Brother–esque reality series on which participants interact solely through a bespoke social network; she keeps the uncanny show surprisingly watchable with her stream of self-referential commentary.

In her latest involvement with Netflix, Buteau takes center stage—and this time, she doesn’t have the answers. Survival of the Thickest, which began streaming last week, stars Buteau as Mavis Beaumont, a plus-size stylist reeling from a breakup kicked off by catching her rich photographer boyfriend in bed with a woman—but “not just any other woman, a skinny model version of me,” as she tells a friend. Mavis hastily leaves Jacque (Taylor Selé), moving out of their stylish Manhattan home and into a cramped Brooklyn apartment where her bedroom doesn’t have a door and her roommate doesn’t have boundaries. Loosely based on Buteau’s 2020 essay collection of the same name, Survival of the Thickest is an effervescent, self-aware story of starting over that implicitly rejects the confines of the “fat best friend” trope. Though sometimes uneven, it’s a welcome new entrant among shows that follow women rebuilding their lives, and Buteau shines in the well-deserved spotlight.

As the emotional anchor of the series, Buteau showcases a range that extends beyond the wise retorts that have earned her the nickname “Queen of Quips.” Buteau’s character—while hilarious—is relieved of having to serve as the show’s moral center, jokingly or otherwise. It might have been tempting, for example, to write Mavis as a woman whose heartbreak immediately becomes bulletproof armor against her cheating ex’s apologetic overtures—or, given Buteau’s real-life career, as a stand-up comedian who turns her situation into fodder for a killer comedy routine. But Survival of the Thickest, which Buteau co-created with Danielle Sanchez-Witzel, gives Mavis space to make bad decisions—a rarity for any Black-woman character, much less a plus-size 38-year-old daughter of Caribbean immigrants. For every triumphant declaration like “I’ma keep it moving and keep my plants watered,” Mavis also flounders in her new post-Jacque life. She trusts a website called roommatefinder.net because she saw it on a bus; she has a one-night stand with a man who woos her at a bar by saying, “If you were my girl, the whole bedroom would be the Vatican, and you’d be my Olivia Pope.”

Read: How Issa Rae built the world of Insecure

In that sense, Survival of the Thickest covers well-trod territory. As long as people have been getting their hearts broken, they’ve been making TV about picking up the pieces afterward. Series such as New Girl, Dollface, and Grace and Frankie followed their protagonists after a catalytic breakup. Insecure and The Incredible Jessica James turned their attention to Black women messily navigating the thorny transition. That said, Survival of the Thickest is particularly attuned to its protagonist’s contradictory feelings about her own body and the extent to which they’re shaped by a male partner’s actions. Romantic betrayal doesn’t happen in a vacuum. However confident Mavis might be, she’s not immune to a lifetime of messaging about what kinds of bodies are most valued.

Early in the first episode, when Jacque playfully photographs Mavis and remarks that the camera loves her, she says: “Is that right? Well, it must be my drumstick-emoji physique. It’s meaty on top, nubby on the bottom. Very delicious.” But after walking in on him in their bed with a model she’d helped style, Mavis’s tone changes. “You know what people say. If someone cheats on Halle Berry, they’re like, ‘Oh my God, how that man cheat on Halle Berry?’” she tells her friend Khalil (Tone Bell) as the two pack up her belongings. “But if someone cheats on someone like me, a thick girl, with problem areas? They’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I get it.’”

Khalil quickly offers some supportive pushback on Mavis’s assessment: “Okay, stop,” he says gently. “Mave. Stop. Do not breathe life into that silly-ass narrative. When somebody cheats, that’s them tryna stroke they own ego.” Because of heartfelt moments like these, Mavis and Khalil’s friendship is a highlight of the series—and an all too rare on-screen example of a presumably straight man and woman who are not building toward romance. Mavis’s pragmatic friend Marley (a wonderfully cast Tasha Smith) also offers the lead much-needed perspective on dating, essentially taking on the role that Buteau would have in a different series. But she gets her own subplot, too, one that sees her questioning the role that men’s approval has played in her own relationships.

Following her breakup, Mavis needs her styling career to buoy her both financially and emotionally. She lands a gig working with a former supermodel named Natasha Karina (Garcelle Beauvais), then with Nicole Byer (as herself), who wants Mavis’s help with the final looks for the plus-size lingerie line she’s set to launch. Most of Mavis’s styling scenes are a delight to watch—Buteau imbues the character with a palpable excitement about her personal and professional mandate. There’s a wonderful earnestness to how she talks about the work, which makes instances of professional tension feel pivotal even when they’re in settings as silly as a wedding organized for two dogs. “This is my fucking calling; this is my purpose,” she says after meeting Byer. “I wanna work with beautiful thickums and make them feel good about themselves and make them feel stylish and look fly!”

Survival of the Thickest packs a lot into this season’s eight-episode run. Sometimes, that feels appropriate—the period after a big breakup certainly can feel like everything is happening all at once. But the show occasionally struggles to keep its many storylines cohesive. An episode that begins with Mavis spending time with Luca, a new Italian paramour (Marouane Zotti), for example, pivots into a clunky meditation on racism in America by spending a baffling amount of time on an altercation with a “Karen.” While racism would undoubtedly shape any Black character’s experience, the narrative diversion is especially noticeable given how short the series runtime is. Spending time with “Karen” means sacrificing time with Luca, Marley, and any of the show’s other delightful supporting characters. Survival of the Thickest is at its most artful when drawing attention to just how much Mavis is trying to balance. The series doesn’t need to do everything to be great—it just needs to keep Buteau’s charm at its center.