TV REVIEW: Sorry, your 'Love Life' isn't that interesting
Zoe Chao and Anna Kendrick in Love Life, on HBO Max.
They say love is a universal language, but that doesn’t mean it should be totally devoid of original thought. HBO Max’s first romcom sitcom, Love Life, is an anthology with each season telling the story about one particular individual’s first relationship to their (hopefully) last. If you’ve seen romantic comedies then you probably know what’s coming, and it’s with some disappointment through the first three episodes that it has yet to make a lasting impression. Every character, line and scene feels like a derivative of something else, and worse, be so mainstream and singular in its point of view that it fails to really say anything to a wider audience.
Darby Carter is a young, single, everyday girl in New York (the city of young, single, everyday people), her personality punctuated by a pastel Fjällräven backpack that has become so ubiquitous among today’s youth. She is played by Anna Kendrick at her Kendrickian best: the smart, sweet and devoted girlfriend, with occasional bouts of insecurity and social awkwardness that only she can pull off without cringe. Her best friend is Sara (Zoë Chao), who is loyal and supportive and everything an on-screen best friend should be, and they live together in a modest apartment.
The first episode begins in 2011 with Darby falling in love for the first time. Augie (Jin Ha) is a budding writer for Politico, and is basically a very woke version of a millennial professional and someone who you should automatically like much more than a lawyer or a finance guy. Things don’t end well, of course, because first relationships usually end that way, and we hit all the goalposts: an instant attraction leading to a one-night stand, a time-consuming sequence about modern-day dating/texting etiquette (easily the worst part) and an eventual breakup because one of them ends up prioritizing their career instead. A lesson for Darby: if your boyfriend’s Knicks fandom lives and dies with Linsanity, he is either a morally hollow bandwagoner or deeply troubled and in need of immediate medical attention.
Jin Ha as Augie, one of Darby’s former flames.
The second episode is similar, with Darby striking up a relationship with her former boss via casual sex, only to break up because of differences in age (he’s old, she’s not), socioeconomic habits (he’s rich, she’s not) and an ex-wife (she’s charming, she’s not). Episode three introduces a greasy-haired bagel aficionado who has OCD about doing chin-ups (a casual humblebrag of 100 a day) with obvious warning signs Darby chooses to ignore (he keeps a second phone for his ex-girlfriend’s voicemails), and there’s some sort of brief treatise on Instagram vs. reality when Augie comes back into the picture. Gee, where have I seen these train wrecks before? (In fact, it’s Sara and her half-in, half-out interracial relationship who seems to have the more interesting story so far). I can live with all of these things, if only to watch Kendrick charismatically tumble through her love life, but meaningful relationships condensed into 30-minute episodes feel like a disservice to such supposedly seminal points in Darby’s life. (Darby and Augie alone probably deserve a two-hour film).
The inclusion of a narrator is charming at best, but unnecessary at its worst because the show seems so self-explanatory; Darby’s narrated (and lengthy) backstory seems to have little to do with her modern-day self, and the bit about early 20th-century birth control in episode three doesn’t have much to do with anything. The show starts with a (loosely) scientific statement about love for “the average person”: how many times we fall in love, how many relationships we have and how many end with heartbreak. This sets up the expectation that not only will Darby’s love life be full of ups and downs, it also implies that her love story contains nothing out of the ordinary. We are simply teased with a scene of a pregnant Darby walking down a street in New York. If the episodes were an email asking for your attention, then the subject line is simply “Hello.”
Darby and the narrator’s point of views are so singular and hackneyed it gets boring very quickly. At least in Definitely, Maybe, the self-reflection of Ryan Reynolds’ love life as a politically woke yuppie New Yorker is partially framed from his 11-year-old daughter’s own point of view. Love Life lacks that extra angle to make it remotely interesting, and another seven episodes of seven disappointing boyfriends is quite possibly the worst-case scenario.
Love Life gets two stars out of four.
