In an Ambien induced speech at a church cult meeting, Mickey, Jillian Jacobs lovable screw-up, neatly sums up Judd Apatow’s new Netflix original series Love:
“You said earlier that if you ask for love, the world will send you love back. But I’ve been asking and asking, and I haven’t gotten fucking anything. Hoping and waiting and wishing and wanting love…hoping…hoping for love has fucking ruined my life.”
Focusing on the very, very beginnings of a relationship between Mickey and Gus, two early-thirty something’s living in LA, played by Jacobs and in charmingly dorky spades by Paul Rust, the series showcases many of the realities that come along with modern romance and basic modern life. In an Apatow signature move, Love uses the power of comedy to focus on many real, and often sad, issues plaguing many people. Addiction, the inability to find “the person,” work problems, and the complexities of friendship are just some of the many more serious themes delivered with a punch line.
If you can take away anything from Love, and there’s a lot to, it should be the strength of its characters. Love takes its time to flush out its two leads, waiting to even have them verbally interact until like the last 30 seconds of the first episode. This gives a great opportunity for both Gus and Mickey to experience two separate but equally traumatic break ups with their significant others as well as give the audience insight to how they individually deal with their problems before the two meet or find out just how differently they act in a relationship. By the end of the first thirty minutes, you feel as if you know these people. You can see their shortcomings and you can fairly accurately theorize what they were like growing up, their values, what kind of music they like, etc.
Even two episode characters have an unforgettable aura, like the painfully millennial star of Wichita, the show Gus works at, played by Apatow’s daughter Iris (and side note, if I’m being honest I have to say I think Judd Apatow’s biggest strength is writing teenage girls). Particularly captivating is Mickey’s roommate Bertie (Claudia O’Doherty), who somehow threatens in the beginning to be the most annoying character in the show and then all of a sudden flips it and becomes one of the most hilarious, well adjusted, and kind.
There are many tender moments in Love that are not just about love, but about being a functioning person in society and how hard that can be. Many of the really hilarious moments arise during the characters workdays. This is seen when Gus tries to desperately move up from an on-set tutor for a horrifyingly melodramatic CW meets ABC Family show called Wichita (where witches get their powers from their periods…yeah) to an actual writer for the show and when Mickey tries/succeeds/screws up momentously to sway her boss’s new romantic affection for her.
Gus, while not conventionally attractive, is a funny, mostly nice, and a put together person while Mickey, who’s extremely beautiful, is a struggling alcoholic, drug addict, and sex addict who can’t help but destroy every relationship in her wake. Compared to Gus, Mickey seems to take many of the harder knocks, especially at the tail end of the show. Although she is self-aware of how she’s treating people and of her addictions, evidenced in a electrifying scene with Andy Dick, where she states after coming down from a strange high that involved dancing on a subway going to The Valley she states, “I’m just, like, this piece of shit.” She can’t help but repeatedly screw up, which results in many interesting developments in her and Gus’s blossoming romance. The show chooses to take Gus in a different route, originally making him an innocent pawn on Mickey’s romantic chessboard and ends up switching it around in a fun way as the show progresses.
Apatow has again created a hit through the simple idea of showcasing everyday people; people who make jokes that land flat, people who look unglamorous in the morning and inappropriate at night, people who show up early and do painfully awkward stuff at parties, and people who do shitty things to other people. While not seemingly a bold choice, in a media landscape where scripted reality television and shows with dragons on them (you all know what I’m talking about) are scarfed down by the average TV-watcher, a fictionalized representation of two people at the beginning of love, whatever that may be, seems like the most real thing on television.
Love is available on Netflix.