K-SCORE: 49
(updated)
Creators: Judd Apatow, Paul Rust, Lesley Arfin
Starring: Paul Rust, Gillian Jacobs, Claudia O’Doherty
Spoiler Level: Moderate
SEASON TWO:
“Mostly... the characters just complain about things”
Season two of Love made me want to bash my face into the screen of my laptop until either there was no more love anywhere in the world or I was dead. I reread my season one review and now am inclined to agree with what my brother Scott saw in the first couple episodes. He read the couple paragraphs where I praise Apatow’s nuance and said, “I couldn’t believe you had those opinions.” Now I can hardly believe I had them. Did he drug me?
The thing is, I’m not wrong in that season one review. The show does examine a modern relationship in a realistic way where the problems of the two characters are real. This isn’t cheesy rom-com crap. But the problem the characters have is that they shouldn’t be with each other. Mickey should have stuck with her promise of being alone. Gus shouldn’t be with anyone because he’s an insufferably annoying selfish piece of shit. Mickey ends season one saying she doesn’t want to be in a relationship for a year and Gus kisses her within a few seconds. Then they’re together immediately afterward, thereby throwing that vow into the wind, and making you feel like there was no character development on the part of either lead. Then season two drags you through their relationship where you get to see just how much that character development was needed! Watching the failed chemistry of these two people as they force interactions is like being chained to the bathroom while a couple of strangers vomit in the general vicinity of the toilet but not exactly the toilet. With your eyelids taped open. This feeling is reminiscent of the scene where you watch Gus vomit in the general vicinity of the toilet but not exactly the toilet.
With season two, Apatow and company reveals that he definitely had no specific location in mind for Mickey and Gus’s relationship as the problem of content bloat gets only worse. This time around Gus struggles to speak with Japanese people because he doesn’t speak Japanese. He’s shipped to Atlanta but tragically they keep filming him. Bertie dates a slob who might be a serial killer. Mickey tries to convince a teenage chubmonster who has a sex podcast to talk about texting pictures of her asshole at her radio station instead of from her own home. They take mushrooms and break into a stranger’s house. A female boxer jumps on the hood of the car of a lying coworker of Mickey’s. None of those things drive any semblance of plot anywhere. Yet those are at least events. Season two of Love has its viewers watching people watch three quarters of an episode of a shitty television show. The two leads house sit at one point and clean up dog crap. They buy and consume some sour patch kids. This is not meaningful content. There’s only like six hours to the whole season; yet Apatow sure does a great job of making it feel like sixteen.
In my season one review, I warned against the potential for Mickey and Gus to fail to have authentic and honest communication, instead playing little relationship games, getting angry about nothing, and catching each other in their lies. In season two, Judd Apatow, Paul Rust, and Leslie Arfin plunge face first into this pit trap. Any semblance of emotional honesty gained one minute is quickly abandoned the next. The finale has Mickey leading Gus away from her ex boyfriend in a scene reminiscent of Benny Hill, striking a cord so dissonant it makes you cringe, and culminating in a baffling non-climax where the two leads simply announce that they’re going to be in a relationship. Then they have sex. They were already in a relationship. They already had sex a bunch of times. I literally spent a minute searching for the next episode because I couldn’t believe they’d just end the season there.
Bertie continues to amuse me, even long after the other characters have dropped off. And though the love story at the heart of Love continues to go nowhere, it has it’s moments of being semi funny. Mickey’s radio job has a much higher success rate than Gus’s so naturally it gets half the screen time. And it’s not so awkward that I couldn’t watch, even though Paul Rust did have his moments of making me want to slam pillows on either side of my head. (It’s the combination of wanting to be liked by all and yet having poor social awareness.)
Mostly though, the characters just complain about things - their jobs, each other, their friends, themselves - and that’s not very fun to watch. It’s possible, probable even, that Paul Rust and Gillian Jacobs simply have next to no real romantic potential. Even the scenes that are supposed to be montages of them having good days don’t feel happy and heartwarming like they should.
I still don’t think it’s too late to change the title. Maybe changing the male lead while we’re on a roll? But watching a love story about Love is like watching a sci-fi epic called Space or baseball narrative called Baseball or something about a gangster in the US called American Gangster.
SEASON ONE:
“never that funny and never that romantic, and yet the overall impression is a lot of both”
Love decides to tackle the almost entirely unexplored territory of romantic relationships. Made by people in LA/Hollywood, it bravely features characters set in LA/Hollywood. And it’s title really specifically tells you what you’re going to get.
Alright, it’s not so bad. Not bad at all, even. Judd Apatow is good at creating authentic characters that blend comedy and drama together under the umbrella of everyday life. Love, as a Netflix series, has the creative freedom to explore its characters in great depth. His films such as Knocked Up, and Funny People didn’t have such freedom and consequently I think he has found a better format. This is what he wants to do and what he’s good at.
Love is strange in that it’s never that funny and never that romantic, and yet the overall impression is a lot of both. It’s main strength is in its ability to get you to think about relationships very deeply. Mickey and Gus are both flawed and both lovable in some way, and they’re not completely compatible. So many love stories feature two characters whose personalities are designed to mesh flawlessly and they just need to get over some superficial obstacles. The obstacles here are not superficial. Mickey is an addict, but not a completely hopeless mess, and Gus doesn’t know how to blend his notions of correct social behavior with the person he actually is. The real personality, the one he hides behind his awkward compliments and lame jokes, is much more meaningful, but also harbors resentment (fairly) for much of what is going on around him, including habits of Mickey’s. Even when Gus is a jerk and refuses to tell Mickey about how and why he’s frustrated with her on their date and then sleeps with an actress, and even when Mickey crafts small lie after small lie for her own personal gain, I was convinced that they should give their relationship a chance. And that makes for compelling and interesting story and that is why I ultimately kind of liked Love. (at least the first season)
“the series is dicking around in all kinds of ways, once literally with Andy Dick”
It is a series wasting time, though. Way too much content has nothing to do with Gus and Mickey’s relationship and doesn’t develop like it should. Especially the stuff with the TV show within the TV show, Witchita, which originally just seemed to be a great source of humor. I like the characters there, especially the black guy that ran the snack table and eventually the little child actress Gus tutors comes around to a good place, but all of the conflicts there feel overblown and built of misunderstandings, unbelievably self-obsessed personalities, and failures ingrained in the studio systems that churn out this episodic crap. I’d be willing to watch a series that meaningfully addresses these failures, but it doesn’t blend well with Love because it isn’t what I really care about. Gus is not driven enough as a potential writer to have potent conflicts within that framework.
Though Witchita is the big example, the series is dicking around in all kinds of ways, once literally with Andy Dick, in an episode where Gus and Mickey only communicated via text message. That shouldn’t get the same thirty minute allotment of my time as the episode where they sleep together or the episode where Mickey tells Gus about her addiction problems. It’s imbalanced and frustrating. Sometimes the casual content, exploring the depth of character beyond the context of the relationship, is an asset. Reality doesn’t conform to plot arcs and tidy development. I’m definitely willing to watch some of it, especially if it’s comical or insightful in its own way, but Love too often isn’t. And I want there to be a direction regardless. I’m not confident the writers know where the story will end up, leaving room for as many or as few episodes as might fit their own personal schedules, lives, and plans - a wretched problem as old as TV, for it does nothing for me the viewer. I don’t care whether you make five episodes or a hundred, as long as the content provided is good throughout. That usually means knowing where to stop.
It’s also very hard for me to watch the show a lot of the time because Gus is so awkward. I don’t find awkward funny, and I hate awkward situations in fiction and in reality more and more. I’d much rather an explosive argument where painful truths are shouted between two people than watch two people subtly catch each other in their lies. My distaste for awkward is progressing beyond simple preference to the point of genuine anxiety. Whenever Gus is casually conversing with someone about a third party, it’s fine, but if he’s on a date, in a meeting, or at a party, I want to bury my head in my pillow and wait for the scene to end. More awareness! More honesty! Yet a show like this is nothing to the plug-your-ears pain of something like Curb Your Enthusiasm so maybe it’s a good treatment for my fear of social imbalance.
The show examines relationships through a sophisticated modern lens, which is valuable, but it does mean that a great deal of the conflicts involve failures derived from trivial or inauthentic communication. They’re texting each other constantly and then go to others to microanalyze the meaning behind each word in the needlessly truncated format. It’s not a flaw with Love, really, but I’d like to see, as the series evolves, Gus and Mickey get better at communicating honestly, otherwise their desires to rigidly hold to texting and social media will overshadow more powerful issues they need to overcome to succeed as a couple. The two best scenes in Love are the one halfway through, at the end of episode five, when Gus lets his anger at Mickey seep out for having been set up with Bertie when it’s clear he has feelings for her, and secondly in the final minute of the last episode when Mickey tells him more honestly what problems she struggles with as a person. If Apatow and the other creators can understand that those kinds of moments are essential as the characters progress, then it could be that the series ends up in a good place. If they rehash conflicts they’ve already done and fall back on the easy-comedy easy-drama mind games of new relationships that they’ve already been through, I’m going to lose interest and lose hope for the characters’ and show’s future.
Is it too late to change the title? I feel like an idiot talking or writing about watching Love. It’s like watching a war movie called War or a crime thriller called Crime or a show for young people called Sexy Vampire Seduces Naive Teenage Girl and Protects her from Absurdly Evil External Threat.