Over the weekend, Netflix dropped the new Judd Apatow rom-com series Love. As with all Netflix releases, a good chunk of the internet spent the weekend binge-watching and dissecting the series to exhaustion, although the furor around Love seems a bit more muted compared to past Netflix shows. It could just be the sparkle of the Netflix model's all-at-once release method is starting to wear off a bit after three years, or maybe it's just that Love feels a little less splashy then, say, the intensity of Jessica Jones or the sprawling character showcase of Orange is the New Black or the colorful absurdity of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Love is, more or less, your typical Apatow romcom stretched out across 10 half-hours. As an indie-esque romcom, it's pretty good! The story, though a little messy, is engrossing enough that I chose to spend my entire lazy Sunday watching til the end to find out if these two silly kooks worked it out in the end. (Spoiler alert: they did!). The performances are all fairly strong, particularly from Gillian Jacobs (who brings her now-signature lovable mess character to dark, fascinating places) and Claudia O'Doherty (who brings so much to her sidekick role that she arguably steals every scene she's in). Like pretty much every single Apatow movie, there are some really amazing scenes and a whole bunch of nonsense that definitely should've been cut, but all in all, it mostly hangs together. Still, Love is not a movie, as much as it feels like one most of the time. It's a television show. And while Love might have made a fine movie, it's doesn't quite know how to be a good TV show.
It's really hard to talk about Love without bringing up You're the Worst. Normally I don't love comparing shows because every show is different and each show has different goals, but the goals of Love and You're the Worst feel incredibly similar in many ways. Both shows are about a particularly privileged group of people living in Los Angeles. Both shows are about two leads who would be considered "unlikable" in most respects. And both shows are about those two leads learning to deal with each other's flaws and etching out a seemingly inevitable relationship. There are some differences between the two: while Love is a cinematic dramedy, You're the Worst is, at its heart, a satirical sitcom. You're the Worst certainly has its heavy moments (particularly in its transcendent second season) but its overall tone is a lot more outwardly comic than Love, which is an occasionally funny, often very depressing look into post-addiction life and the struggles to maintain an intimate relationship. Additionally, You're the Worst seems to feel that its protagonists' relationship is, ultimately, good for both of them. Whether or not Jimmy and Gretchen are endgame, it's clear to see how the show suggests their budding romance is genuinely improving both of them as people. With Love, that's far less clear. When the season ends with Rust and Mickey kissing at the spot they first mess, the tone is half wistful, half utterly depressing. These are two broken people, and the show doesn't seem convinced that they aren't breaking each other down even more. That final kiss is perhaps the very best scene in the show's entire first season, and it makes the journey there make far more sense in hindsight.
That, in essence, is one of the strengths of the streaming model and its inherent serialization - the end, in most cases, justifies the journey that got us there, no matter how messy that journey is. Most of the pieces I've read about Love today describe it as a show that has "a slow start, but makes it worth it in the end", or posits that the show "finds itself in its last few episodes." I'd quibble with this just a bit - to me the show never quite matched the heights of its second episode, which is the first time Mickey and Gus meet and the only time they seem like they might actually work as a couple - but, in general, the show does become more focused as it goes on, and after a really messy patch of episodes (episodes 3 and 4 are almost completely useless to the show's narrative), the show does snap into focus in its back half, once Mickey and Gus actually go on their first date. Once the show hits that point, it becomes easy to forgive some of the questionable, go-nowhere scenes that got us there. If Love were airing week-to-week, I doubt I would've made it that far - truthfully, I probably would've bailed after that awful threeway scene in the pilot - but when all of the episodes are laid out in front of you, it's hard not to think "alright, this is leading somewhere." (Plus, what else is there to do on a boring Sunday afternoon?). And then it does! And when it does, and when that "somewhere" is actually pretty satisfying, it's easy to think "well, they nailed it. They may have had trouble getting there, but they nailed it!".
Yet when a show is so focused on nothing but what it's leading up to, it starts to feel like it's missing something. This is where the You're the Worst comparison seems most apt. You're the Worst is generally structured like a traditional sitcom in that, while there is an overarching plot to its seasons, each episode is still, well, an episode. There are A stories, B stories, and sometimes C stories that come to some sort of conclusion at the end of 22 minutes. These stories work not to just establish the narrative of the season, but to study the show's characters, expand the show's world, and find out what makes the people who inhabit that world funny and interesting - and not just Jimmy and Gretchen, but Edgar and Lindsay and Becca and Vernon and Sam and...you get the point. All of these people serve purpose to Gretchen and Jimmy, sure, but they're also strong characters independent of their ties to the show's leads. This helps to create a world so well-developed that the show's two season finales both take place at giant parties that involved pretty much every member of the show's large ensemble, and never once when focusing on that ensemble are you wondering "okay, but what's going on with Jimmy and Gretchen?".
Compare that with Love, where pretty much every character is immediately defined by their relationship to Mickey and Gus. Bertie - the show's strongest character outside of its two protagonists - still mostly only appears in scenes involving one of the two (with the exception of a minor, underdeveloped plotline involving her hooking up with one of Gus's friends). The show does have a fairly sprawling supporting cast, and some of the most delightful scenes are when we get a behind-the-scenes look at the comically terrible show that Gus tutors for, but we don't get to see any of this working independently. We only get to see it when we're learning something that suggests why Gus or Mickey should be together, or shouldn't be together, or can't be together. Everything in Love serves the purpose of leading to that final scene at the gas station. And while that final scene is great, it doesn't change the fact that there's not really much of a show leading up to that point. The very best streaming shows - Bojack Horseman, Orange is the New Black, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - find a way to combine the allure of the binge model with the episodic structure that works to create the very best TV. If Love wants to go from being a nice idea and a generally fine television show into a genuinely great show (and I do think the potential is there for that to happen), it needs to take cues from those shows and start acting like...well, a TV show.
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