The Final Season of ‘Physical’ Is Blood, Sweat, and Cheers
When we last left Sheila Rubin—the sharp-witted but self-loathing San Diego housewife-turned-fitness guru at the center of Apple TV+’s Physical—she had just been to hell and back. Not literally, of course, unless your picture of hell is hitting a mental rock bottom and severe relapse. In that case, Sheila got about as close to the fire as possible.
At the end of its second season, Physical saw Sheila (played by a note-perfect Rose Byrne) coming to terms with her lifelong patterns of disordered eating. But alongside seeking recovery, Sheila also sought revenge. The combination of bingeing, purging, and obsessive-compulsive behavior ruined her marriage, alienated her mentors in the fitness world, and made her a pariah to everyone but her best friend and business partner Greta (Dierdre Friel). But that isolation only drove her taste for annihilation and control, and Season 2 closed with Sheila setting her sights on another competitor, finally becoming the ruthless ’80s aerobics industry kingpin that the show promised from its start.
In its final season, which premieres August 2, Physical at last finds the right marriage between the people in Sheila’s orbit and the ultra-compelling character at its center. Yet the series doesn’t make the mistake of scrapping her expertly crafted pathos, just so Sheila can exist as a cutthroat girlboss caricature, either. Across Season 3’s 10 episodes, Physical confidently step-touches its way to an ending fit for the realistic complexity of recovery; there are occasional backslides, but they only make the monumental leaps forward all the more special.