On and On and On

Rose Matafeo begins her first solo stand-up special in six years with a choreographed dance routine, claiming she is terrible at endings and wanted to front-load the memorable stuff. The rest of the hour is built around a sprawling, 16,000-word entry in her phone’s Notes app. It is a frantic, hyper-verbal catalog of her modern neuroses, failed relationships, and anxieties about aging, delivered at a breathless clip.

Filmed at London’s Britten Theatre and released on Max in late 2024, the special arrived at a high point in Matafeo’s career, following the success of her sitcom Starstruck. She taped the set while suffering from laryngitis and heavily medicated on steroids, yet she maintains a high-energy pace throughout. She spends the hour contrasting her lonely twenties spent dating posh British men with the indignity of getting dumped in her thirties. Notable routines include a polarizing joke that tests the limits of her crowd’s feminism, her frustration with online relationship coaches, and the realization that she has not grown up nearly as much as her parents had at her age.