Another streaming service, another dramedy about the tribulations of straight people. HBO Max—Warner’s answer to the Netflix problem—debuts on May 27, and with it comes the platform’s first original scripted series, the banally titled Love Life. It’s a curious way for HBO Max to announce its arrival, small and wistful and covering lots of familiar territory. Yet Love Life has a sharpness and a depth that its premise, and title, may not suggest—a fact that’s perhaps crucial to the maintenance of HBO’s good name, which threatens to be sullied by a Netflixian deluge of content soon to arrive on Max.
The series, from creator Sam Boyd, follows Darby Carter (a TV character name if ever there was one) as she navigates New York, her career, and romance from the wilderness of her early 20s in roughly the late-aughts (I think?) into the steadier, if no less searching, plowed land of her 30s. She’s played by Anna Kendrick, an actor whose pinched neuroticism, always laced with self-deprecating bite, is often put to good use on the series. She is, I guess, supposed to be a kind of Everywoman—but her perspective as a straight, white, highly educated woman who can afford to flail around an expensive city considerably narrows her purview, and the show’s.
Still, Love Life manages to wrestle some piquant insights out of its limited constraints. The writing is keen to the subtle pleasures and indignities of sex and love, the frustrations that arise out of regular problems rather than the outsized absolutes so often created for TV. In the eight episodes I’ve seen, Darby never finds herself with a caddish cartoon, never foolishly rejects the obviously good guy she should so clearly be with. Instead, as each episode traces the rise and fall of a relationship (though some get more than a half-hour), we see the creep of little differences, of feathery cracks in a coupling’s foundation that eventually bring things to a slow, weary collapse.
I like the measured, realistic comportment Love Life strikes in many episodes. It’s refreshing, to see a show that’s content with a modest scale, that trusts its audience to glean the drama (and comedy) out of more quotidian experience. Though the show does try to graft some profundity on things, mostly in the form of voiceover narration provided by the great, certainly too-good-for-this Lesley Manville. Her hushed British tones don’t quite evoke a David Attenborough nature documentary, but they certainly add an air of wise, academic remove, meant to impart a seriousness of inquest to a show that, again, traffics in a lot of cliché (albeit in a sharper than usual way). I’ll admit to being a little moved as a few episodes drew to a close; Manville makes us feel the bigger cosmic meaning of some romantic undulation that might otherwise seem less than remarkable.
In that sense, Manville is the star player here, though of course this is Kendrick’s vehicle. As written, Darby is sometimes too much of a blank, reflecting the thematic intent of an individual episode at the expense of a consistent, season-spanning characterization. Would the Darby who flails awkwardly into a relationship with the charming Politico writer (ugh) Augie (Jin Ha) also be the Darby who has a meet-cute-turned-hookup while peeing on a roof with a dope at a party? Maybe; maybe not. Love Life needs its One Woman’s Journey construction to sell the mounting poignancy of the series, but I also found myself wondering what the show might be if each episode featured a different protagonist. It’s hard to imagine any post-adolescent whose romantic life happens to encompass so many different dating tropes; hard as Love Life, and Kendrick, try to assure us that it’s possible, the conceit often rings false.
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May 27, 2020 at 08:05PM
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Love Life Review: HBO Max Kicks Off Its Scripted Content with Yet Another Millennial Romance - Vanity Fair
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