Rob Lowe and John Owen Lowe on ‘Unstable’ Season 2, What Nepo Babies and the Brat Pack Have in Common, and Why Wrapping ‘9-1-1: Lone Star’ Feels Like the ‘End of an Era’

variety.com:

Max Gao SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Unstable,” now streaming on Netflix. Rob Lowe and his son John Owen Lowe always knew that playing characters whose dynamic closely resembled their real-life one would force them to relive and re-examine parts of their own relationship.

But for the second season of their Netflix comedy “Unstable” — in which Rob plays eccentric biotech entrepreneur Ellis Dragon, and John Owen co-stars as Ellis’ high-strung son, Jackson — the Lowes wanted to lean even more into the “metaness” of the series. “It took doing a TV show with each other for Rob and I to re-explore some of the deeper parts of our interpersonal relationship, so we figured, why not make it so that Ellis and Jackson have to literally play characters in order for them to work through an interpersonal conflict?” John Owen tells Variety. “It’s literally a wink at what we’re doing on the show for our father-son relationship.” And so, in Episode 7, titled “Ron Tabasco,” Ellis and Jackson end up crashing a small-town real-estate convention, where they adopt fake identities and are finally able to get to the root of the tension in their strained relationship. “The notion that these two people are having to play fake people to speak openly about how they really feel about each other was such a smart concept, and I loved it when they pitched it to me,” Rob says. “And to play two characters — playing Ellis Dragon playing a fake realtor named Ron Tabasco — is exactly why I signed up to do this show!” “The scene where we might actually physically fight was one of my favorite things to shoot in the entire season, because it’s so absurd,” Rob adds. “It captured the essence of the comedy of the show that I love,.