The Turkish romantic dramedy Thank You, Next has always been more about the main character’s romantic choices than about the downturns. But the third season starts off with Leyla in a down mood after she finds out who her most recent ex, Cem, really is.
THANK YOU, NEXT SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A table with pictures, shredded paper, a cake and a balloon that says “Goodbye” on it. A dog looks out the back door, but then starts barking when a man he knows he doesn’t like approaches.
The Gist: Leyla Taylan (Serenay Sarikaya) is on a flight back to Istabul from New York, and she has a dream that her ex, Cem Murathan (Hakan Kurtas) is sitting next to her, despite essentially running roughshod over her life. She wakes up from the nightmare as the plane is about to descend.
After Cem went back to his former wife Defne (Gülcan Arslan), Leyla realized how much he manipulated her and decided to sue him for invasion of privacy. She decided to stay in Istanbul before going back to work, despite the fact that the rest of her friends — and coworkers — are on vacation at a beach resort.
In the meantime, Cem is troubled by Defne’s drinking, but still wants the two of them to put on a united front as Cem accepts awards and makes other public appearances. Defne basically has the narcissistic Cem dead to rights when she tells him, “He says he loves me to hurt the woman he loves,” i.e. Leyla.
Leyla confides in another one of her exes, Feyyaz (Boran Kuzum), and picks up her dog Buddy from the parents of yet another ex, Ömer (Metin Akdülger), visiting Buddy’s puppies for the first time. She then visits her uncle and finds out that he and his partner broke up after almost 20 years. Love seems to be the furthest from Leyla’s mind right now. She and Feyyez decide to surprise their friends at the resort town, where Ömer just showed up… and Cem and Defne are about to visit.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like we’ve been saying since the show began, Thank You, Next is like Sex And The City, but with a lot of lawyers.
Our Take: It seems like we’ve waited through the first two seasons of Thank You, Next to get a picture of the difficulty Leyla has had in her love life, even when there are multiple suitors looking to spend time with the sexy, life-loving, strong-minded attorney. Most of the first two seasons made it feel like Leyla’s life was one long party, punctuated by occasional disappointments from which she always rebounded. But Season 3 sees deeper consequences, especially after she got hoodwinked by Cem.
Cem, of course, isn’t out of the picture, as his marriage to Defne is on the decline and he likely still has feelings for Leyla. But at least at the beginning of Season 3 he’s more or less dead to Leyla, through manipulations of his own creation. Whether the court case she has initiated against him brings them together again is still to be determined. It’ll certainly be a feat of writing gymnastics to not just get them back into each other’s orbits, but get Leyla liking Cem again, but we wouldn’t put it past this show to do it.
As usual, the friends around Leyla are more or less there to be sounding boards that she can complain about her love life to. Leyla is one of those people who seems to remain friends with her exes, even Ömer, though that may be because they co-parent Buddy. But at this point it seems like Ömer, Feyyaz and even Sarp (Ahmet Rifat Sungar), who has always had an unrequited crush on Leyla, have moved on.
This means that Leyla doesn’t have them as romantic fallbacks, which puts her in an unusual position. Will that make her vulnerable again to Cem’s charms? Do we even want to see her back together with someone as slimy as Cem?
Performance Worth Watching: Serenay Sarikaya is still radiant as Leyla, even when she’s being sad and trying to figure out what’s next in her personal life.
Sex And Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: We see Buddy once again barking at Cem, and Cem asking where Leyla is. A young girl comes out and yells, “It’s that man!”
Sleeper Star: Gülcan Arslan has the meatiest dramatic scenes as the depressed and constantly drunk Defne, and she pulls them off well.
Most Pilot-y Line: There’s a mini-storyline about one of Leyla’s friends/co-workers dating a pop star and getting a reputation in the press as the “overbearing girlfriend,” but it just elicited a shrug from us.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The third season of Thank You, Next is still glamorous, but it certainly starts out in a more melancholic place than the first two seasons did, which gives both Leyla and the story more depth than before.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.