“I COULD THROW UP” the kid says. He’s sitting at a seafood shack in Malibu, a sunset breeze blowing in. Before him is a plastic tray piled high with the fruits of the sea, fried in batter and glistening under the fluorescents and the tinny sound of Lita Ford on the speakers.
His father sits next to him. Ten minutes ago, at the counter, his dad had been hopping around, hand on his son’s shoulder, muttering snippets of the menu aloud like a kid at Baskin-Robbins, as if the bounty of choices were not to be believed. “Scallops and the… we have to get—no, we have to get… okay, let’s see, clam strips—need those—oh no no, wait, here’s the—look at this, Johnny—the Sampler! We have to get the Sampler. ‘Two pieces of fish, six shrimp, one portion of calamari, one portion of clam strips, three scallops—’”
Here he turned to his boy and said, disbelieving: “And a crab cake?”
The dad was practically on tiptoes as he said to the guy behind the counter, “We’ll have the Sampler—and!” He smiled big, proud that he knew this next move: “I’ll have your clam chowder.”
The dad was acting like an excited kid while his son looked on, grinning and rolling his eyes like a dad. Now, at the table, the kid feels like he could throw up, but in a good way. “This is amazing,” he says, dipping a french fry in the hot sauce. The kid is not a kid at all but John Owen Lowe, 27, cocreator, co–executive producer, cowriter, and star of Unstable, a new show on Netflix on which he plays a son who rolls his eyes a lot at his father. The father is played by his actual father, Rob Lowe.
Rob doesn’t eat this way often—he has been a spokesman for Atkins for five years, and fried batter is not part of the Atkins diet. John Owen doesn’t, either—he’s five years sober and tends to treat his body and mind like someone who feels lucky to still have both. But you have to
