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"It's hard for me to describe," a therapy patient tells Val of his latest problem. "It's something kind of f--ked up." "Good," she replies. "That's my specialty." Val, played wonderfully by Michaela Watkins, is the heroine of "Casual," a smart and often moving new dramedy debuting tomorrow on Hulu. She's 39, recently separated from her cheating husband, and she and teenage daughter Laura (Tara Lynne Barr) are living with her brother Alex (Tommy Dewey), cynical co-founder of an online dating service that's starting to blow up. "Casual" was created by Zander Lehmann, and executive produced by Jason Reitman. While the use of Alex's website as a central plot device, as well as the very active nature of Laura's sex life, could make this seem like a TV series version of Reitman's critically-savaged "Men, Women & Children," Lehmann, Reitman and company are telling a much more specific story here, about three people damaged in a particular way,...

I. The Rattigan Version

After his first dramatic success, The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan conceived a double bill of one-act plays in 1946. Producers dismissed the project, even Rattigan’s collaborator Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. Actor John Gielgud agreed. “They’ve seen me in so much first rate stuff,” Gielgud asked Rattigan; “Do you really think they will like me in anything second rate?” Rattigan insisted he wasn’t “content writing a play to please an audience today, but to write a play that will be remembered in fifty years’ time.”

Ultimately, Rattigan paired a brooding character study, The Browning Version, with a light farce, Harlequinade. Entitled Playbill, the show was finally produced by Stephen Mitchell in September 1948, starring Eric Portman, and became a runaway hit. While Harlequinade faded into a footnote, the first half proved an instant classic. Harold Hobson wrote that “Mr. Portman’s playing and Mr. Rattigan’s writing...