Loot: Season 3 - Maya Rudolph Keeps Giving, But the Political Edge is Lost

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Back in 2022, in COVID shut-in days, Apple TV+ launched the escapist comedy series Loot, something of a parody of TV’s obsession with extreme wealth (Succession, Billions, The Gilded Age, Palm Royale and the Real Housewives franchise).

In the series, Saturday Night Live alumnus Maya Rudolph stars as a freshly divorced tech billionaire’s ex-wife who, in collaboration with her sassy gay personal assistant Nicholas (Joel Kim Booster), decides to give away her fortune through a hands-on involvement in a charity. Said charity, The Wells Foundation, is run by a handful of eccentric do-gooders.

Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Stephanie Styles, Maya Rudolph, Joel Kim Booster, Nat Faxon and Ron Funches

Loot's creators Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard, former writers on the mock-doc Amy Poehler series Parks and Recreation, took their inspiration from Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, the philanthropist, MacKenzie Scott, to create a variation on the workplace sitcom. The premise is a favourite from 1930s screwball comedies about the naive, wealthy characters who finds life purpose and romance among the rough-and-tumble common folk. 

Consistent with the big investment in streaming projects, Loot puts its big budget on the screen. The first season featured a multi-tiered yacht, a private jet, and a colossal mansion (starring the largest and most expensive house in the United States, a Bel Air mansion called “The One”).

Rudolph changes in and out of enough outré costume changes to rival Emily in Paris (who, let’s be real, would not have enough closet space in a Paris apartment for a fifth of her wardrobe). But Loot, in the first season, also had its serious political side, culminating in a season-ending Frank Capra truth-to-power moment  

After a botched water filtration project exposes the hypocrisy of wealthy do-gooders, Molly takes the stage at a Davos-style event to declare that wealth “makes people crazy. It makes people think they’re geniuses who can tell other people how to live …  If we stopped to listen to someone who wasn’t in our bubble, we’d see that we are the problem. Billionaires shouldn’t exist.”

The project of giving away all of Molly’s money ($120 billion) and freeing the world from billionaires, inched forward slowly in Season 2. But a lot of screen time was spent on romance, with Molly pushing the socially awkward Sofia (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez) toward a new romance, while Molly found comfort in a possible relationship with a shy accountant, Arthur (Nat Faxon).

She joined forces with a fellow wealthy divorcée, Grace (Ana Gasteyer) and they posed together in evening gowns and makeup for the cover of Vanity Fair, above the headline: “We shouldn’t exist!”

In the final episode of the season, in a scene parodying Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Molly was confronted by a circle of masked and robed billionaires who warned her to stop her campaign or face dire consequences. She instantly recognized them and told them to get lost. But she was rattled because. Grace, too, had betrayed her, When Arthur wanted to put the brakes on their relationship, Molly began spiralling, commanding her loyal assistant, Nicholas to take her away, anywhere. 

At the start of season 3, the first two episodes of which drop this week, we find that Molly and Nicholas have crash-landed their plane on a deserted, if curiously well-accommodated island. All this turns out to be a ruse designed by the over-protective Nicholas to snap Molly out of her funk. The island, which Molly’s husband bought and forgot about, is shared by a nudist commune, named Vagine, run by another billionaire, Gerald Canning (Henry Winkler).

Later episodes focus on absurd set-ups in the pursuit of emotional connections, featuring other characters in the Wells Foundation office.  Nicholas tries to refashion Arthur into a hipster for a big date with Molly, which ends disastrously. Molly takes Nicholas, who’s feeling burnt out, for a perfect day. But, later, he leaves Molly to pursue his acting career in Korea. Meanwhile, Howard, the Wells Foundation’s IT man, has a romantic adventure of his own with Sofia’s wild sister, Destiny (X Mayo).

Molly’s ex, John Novak (Adam Scott), comes back into the picture as he plans a grossly extravagant wedding in Italy (again echoing Jeff Bezos) to his suspect fiancé, Luciana (D’Arcy Carden), and of course, the entire Wells Foundation jets over to attend.

Throughout Loot mixes broad slapstick with cringe comedy and moments of introspective sharing and caring. The cast members, drawn from stand-up and improv comedy, are diverse and appealing (though a couple of the Wells Foundation employees, played by Stephanie Styles and Meagen Fay, feel under-used.)  

Rudolph sets the tone, switching effortlessly between callously imperious and open and over-sharing, behaviour echoed by Booster’s Nicholas, who also reminds us that narcissists can also be adorable.

All this makes Loot a lightly witty, feel-good watch. But there is something missing in this third season. Apart from an episode which takes place in England, which links old money pomp and past colonial abuses, the politics feels backgrounded. The series feels more like a make-it-up-as-we-go-along television sitcom than a multi-part narrative with any serious points to make.

Could this be the effect of political climate change? Not only do billionaires still exist, they’re not even secretive. As US senator Bernie Sanders noted in an op-ed earlier this year, the United States, under President Trump, is now, unapologetically, “a government of billionaires, by billionaires and for billionaires.” 

On rewatching the first two seasons’ finales, I was intrigued to see parallels to One Battle After Another, written and directed by Rudolph’s husband Paul Thomas Anderson, a film which New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg described as “an anti-fascist film at a fascist moment.” Perhaps it is no longer prudent to assert that billionaires should not exist. Loot, Season 3 ends on a cliff-hanger, but it’s not about anything that could make a rich person high on wealth feel uncomfortable.

Loot. Created by Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard. Starring Maya Rudolph, Henry Winkler, Adam Scott, Joel Kim Booster, Arthur Nat Faxon, Ron Funches, Stephanie Styles and Meagen Fay, Henry Winkler, D’Arcy Carden and X-Mayo.The first two episodes of Loot, Season 3, are currently available on AppleTV+, with one new episode each Wednesday until Dec. 10.