It’s likely that most Americans won’t even notice that the second season of Netflix’s great Argentinian comedy Envious has arrived on the platform this week, and that’s a real shame. The show, which first premiered in September of 2024, is a terrifically funny and heartfelt sitcom about a 40-year-old woman named Vicky (Griselda Siciliani) struggling to find love and happiness, jealous that all of her friends have seemingly perfect lives. Season two picks up after Vicky has accepted the proposal from her ex-boyfriend Dani and, though this should be one of the happiest times of her life, she misses her ex from season one, Matias. Will Vicky continue to sabotage herself and her own happiness, or is this the season she finally gets her life together?
ENVIOUS (SEASON 2): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Vicky (Siciliani) finds herself in a slow-moving traffic jam. when the car in front of her suddenly stops short. She rear-ends the car and, in turn, the car behind her hits her, too. The driver of the car in front of her is Matias, the rough-around-the-edges restauranteur she was dating during season one. The driver of the car behind her is Dani, her ex-boyfriend who proposed to her out of nowhere in the season finale. A moment later, we see Vicky describing the situation to her therapist and learn it’s all just one big, metaphorical dream she had.
The Gist: 40-year-old Vicky spent most of the first season unhappy about her life. After spending ten years with Dani, a man she nurtured and supported so he could become a lawyer, she realized he was never going to propose so she broke things off with him. Within weeks, Dani met a newer, younger woman and had a shotgun wedding. Devastated by those events, Vicky started questioning all of her life choices, and eventually jumped into a relationship with Matias, the kind and not-at-all her type manager of a Chinese restaurant near her apartment. At the end of last season, as she recovered from an injury, Dani showed up to admit he missed Vicky and wanted to spend his life with her, at the exact moment that Matias arrived on her doorstep, flowers in hand, to take care of her.
As season two begins, Vicky is planning her large, lavish wedding to Dani, who promises money and stability but no passion. It’s the thing she always thought she wanted until she met Matias, who offered her the opposite: true love and total unpredictability. She’s now broken up with Matias but sharing custody of their dog (whose name is Broken) and preparing to get married to the man she always thought was her soul mate. But the prospect of spending the rest of her days with Dani is giving her panic attacks. Much of the show’s action takes place in Vicky’s therapist’s office as she explains her many neuroses and works through them (if you watched season one you might remember that Vicky’s need to be loved comes from deep-seated abandonment issues after her father walked out on her family), and she’s having second thoughts about this wedding, mainly because even though Matias was an unlikely match for her, he was a true love.
One of the reasons Vicky doubted her feelings for Mattias was that he appeared to have little ambition, running a Chinese take-out restaurant, but he managed to turn the place into a successful, trendy restaurant, and it pains Vicky to see him thriving and she can’t share in that with him. On the day of her engagement party, Vicky breaks out in hives at the idea that she’s going to have to spend her life tethered to Dani and his wealthy but boring family, and when Broken runs off, all the way back to Matias’s restaurant, she leaves her own party to get the dog and face Matias. He’s obviously still hurt that he wasn’t the man Vicky chose, telling her, “Between love and a gated community, you chose the gated community. You broke my heart. But not because you didn’t choose me, but because the woman I thought had awakened in you didn’t exist.” If Vicky had thought that the door to Matias’s heart was ajar and she might be able to go home to him, well, that closed the door pretty quickly, leaving her wondering what to do and whether she’s mucked it all up for herself.
Our Take: The premise of the first season of Envious was Vicky’s dissatisfaction with her life after seeing her sister and friends all successfully enjoying great jobs, marriage, and kids. In real life and in the therapist’s office, the grass was always greener in everyone else’s yard and there was nothing that could convince Vicky otherwise. Season two offers something a little different, in that hindsight has shown Vicky that, actually things were pretty great for her when she was with Matias, and now, somehow, she’s acting like she’s jealous of the version of herself from a few months earlier. But that’s who Vicky is, unaware and completely oblivious to the fact that she’s a self-saboteur.
I have no doubt that if Envious was given more attention and marketing in the U.S., it would have a much wider audience, it undoubtedly deserves it. It’s a tight, well-written sitcom with a talented star it the center, and on top of churning out joke after joke, it’s a tender story of a vulnerable woman learning how to love herself and having a miserable time doing it.
Sex and Skin: None so far this season.
Parting Shot: Vicky cradles her dog in her arms as she stands in the middle of Matias’s restaurant. He has just told her how devastated he is at their breakup, adding, “You left, but I left, too.” It seems like his way of getting closure on their relationship but it leaves Vicky devastated unsure if either of these men in her life will take her back.
Performance Worth Watching: Griselda Sicialiani is truly the star here, her physicality and facial expressions do a lot of the heavy lifting on the show. But Matias, played by Esteban Lamothe, has a rugged Anthony Bourdain quality and he’s the perfect version of a sensitive but tough romantic partner you wish Vicky would get back with.
Memorable Dialogue: Vicky stresses out about spending the rest of her life with Dani in her therapists office, saying she has a lot of questions about her future like, “Will my marriage last a lifetime? How it will be to have sex with the same person for life. If Dani’s receding hairline will turn into full baldness. When it will happen, if it will gradually thin out or if he’ll just go completely bald one day. Those kinds of things.” That’s Vicky for you.
Our Call: Envious is one of those shows like Younger or Shrinking that started its first season with its protagonist working a very specific angle, and slowly evolving into a broader story filled with an ensemble of very specific and well-drawn characters. The supporting cast all revolves around Vicky, but they create a specific environment that’s hilarious in spite of and because of its dysfunction. STREAM IT!
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.
