HBO Max's 'Love Life' is a halfhearted attempt to make you catch feelings
Watching TV is a lot like dating. There are shows that draw you in from the outset, others that require more work to reveal something you love, and some that are so perfectly synced to your heart and sense of humor that they feel like watching a piece of yourself come to life on-screen.
Love Life thinks it is all of those shows. It is none of them.
HBO Max's romantic comedy series — one of the first originals from the brand-new platform — comes from In a Relationship director Sam Boyd, with production credits for Paul Feig, Bridget Bedar, and star Anna Kendrick. The series follows Darby Carter (Kendrick) through 10 significant chapters of her relationship history, reminding us from the opening scenes that love is a journey.
Not all relationships are long-term or serious or based in love or end in heartbreak, but they still matter, at least inasmuch as helping us grow as people while we inch our way toward The One.
With narration from an unidentified and inexplicable English woman, Love Life makes missteps from the start. Not hearing Darby's inner monologue from Darby herself adds a wall between her and the audience, and kills crucial time that could be spent fleshing out any of the details of Darby's world, including her personality, history, and ambitions. It also repeatedly distracts us with the question of why everyone in Hollywood wants Helen Mirren to narrate their mediocre rom coms, and how Ms. Mirren manages to elegantly decline this torrent of superfluous requests.
Darby is a privileged white New York millennial, which is ostensibly the show’s target demo, but the genre self awareness (of which there is little) doesn’t make the story any more refreshing. It might be her life and her story, but her strategically diverse friends exist as little more than a sounding board for romantic updates and frequent “You go girl” heart-to-hearts which grow increasingly uncomfortable to watch.
Sara (Zoe Chao) and Mallory (Sasha Compère) get little in the way of their own dreams or identities and coo and fawn at Darby's antics without calling out her mistakes, like when she drinks enough at her boyfriend's father's funeral to give a speech and then vomit lasagna. Sara eventually gets a half hour where Darby condescends to temporarily take care of her, but after eight episodes Mallory gets to do nothing but support her friends' heterosexual nonsense and even smile it off when Darby misses her birthday.
What frustrates endlessly about Love Life is that it is not too lofty a premise to execute. You don't have to sacrifice a character's wider world and friends to tell a story focused on their romantic endeavors. You don't have to whitewash nearly every significant role and stick to every cliché, especially when doing no visible work to subvert them.
Darby's love life features an enviable apartment, a vaguely artsy career, and a beekeeping hipster with an impressive beard, with nothing new to say about any of it. The apartment looks nice, the museum job pays the bills, and the bearded man with the Latin name is a nightmare of modern masculinity who gets to be the focal point of multiple episodes. It's enough to make you nostalgic for HBO's Girls, where everyone was white and privileged but at least more interesting in how they manifested their awfulness.
It's worth noting that the show is extremely heterosexual, which is certainly a reality for many people. But as with everything else about Darby — her race, her class, her city, her aspirations — the show is painfully clear about playing it safe to appeal to a wider audience and saving anything “edgy” for side characters and future seasons, if at all.
Love Life is the off-brand knockoff of the thing it wants to be. If you must watch (though here we are obliged to point you directly to Netflix's Lovesick instead) think of any disappointment as the TV equivalent of a one-night stand or a lukewarm date. This isn't the end of the road for you, and there's something better out there.
You can stream the first three episodes of Love Life on HBO Max, with new episodes weekly.
Proma Khosla is a Senior Entertainment Reporter writing about all things TV, from ranking Bridgerton crushes to composer interviews and leading Mashable's stateside coverage of Bollywood and South Asian representation. You might also catch her hosting video explainers or on Mashable's TikTok and Reels, or tweeting silly thoughts from @promawhatup.
