Why I couldn’t finish Love
This week, I decided to take a detour from my usual topic of film and talk about Netflix’s latest original series, entitled Love, co-created by everybody’s favorite comedy uncle Judd Apatow and real-life married couple Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin (both of whom you’ve no doubt seen onscreen and/or heard of their work). I had heard about the show’s “brilliance” from several close friends, and because Netflix’s content has always pretty much been synonymous with quality, I decided I’d set aside the time to watch some of it on a Saturday afternoon. Two episodes in, I had to stop.
At the heart of the show is Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (Paul Rust), two L.A. transplants with equally unexciting lives, compounded by the fact that they’ve just gone through pretty bad breakups. The two meet at a gas station in Silverlake and (presumably) fall in love. I say “presumably” because I couldn’t get past the second episode upon my first try. Two weeks later, I put in my best effort to finish the third, and just barely made it out alive.
My number-one issue lay with the casting of our two leads. Mickey is outstandingly gorgeous. Gus, is, well, not. And it may seem juvenile, crass and inappropriately judgmental to critique a show based solely on the beauty of its protagonists, but where Love goes so wrong is precisely in this area. Because, while it may appear “fresh” and “real” when contrasted with typically superficial Hollywood shows of yore (read: 90210 or anything else on The CW past and present), it perpetuates possibly an even worse scenario. As writer EJ Dickson describes in an essay for Mic about the “Hotness Double Standard,” the show furthers “the notion that the average-looking Nice Guy can net the babe of his dreams simply by virtue of his Niceness.” As Dickson goes on to say, “When the Nice Guy is deprived of what he sees as the ultimate reward for his niceness, he gets frustrated. He gets mad. And in some cases, he can get violent.”
Furthermore, the real chances of this show doing harm to younger audiences (and even medium-aged audiences like me and my friends) who swallow what it’s propagating wholeheartedly (simply by virtue of the fact that it’s “real” and “convincing”) just adds to the show’s dangerous cocktail. Before Mickey purportedly even falls for Gus, she’s victim to a string of abuse by even more unattractive men who belittle, demean and use for her body. And whom she sleeps with anyway. How, in any way, is this a good show?
In writing this, I’m looking out for the impressionable younger me. The one who hasn’t read into feminist theory yet or written a paper on the female revenge fantasy in Thelma & Louise or understood that Hollywood’s vision is, in fact, a skewed one. I’m looking out for the 11- to 15-year-old that turned toward television and film to maybe clear up the mystery of what her future might look like. If we’re told that Jacobs — who, for all intents and purposes, could play the goddess Aphrodite if the opportunity arose — is okay with being mistreated and preyed upon by a litany of men, who’s to say that younger me would know to be treated otherwise when the time came?
“It gets better,” several people have told me — not just the ones who loved it the first go-around, but some who had written it off and then went back to see what all the fuss was about. They say that Gus’ “nice guy” qualities diminish and you really get to peel back the layers of Mickey’s alcoholism and depression (if this is the case, then what is truly redeemable about Gus after all?). Instead of perpetuating stereotypes, it apparently attempts to dismantle them. But, as Vox writer Caroline Framke puts it, “If I weren’t committed to watching all 10 episodes of Love for this review, I would have tapped out after the second episode.”
If we were to take the pilot as a stand-alone piece of work, it does nothing but further the Woody-Allen-meets-Diane-Keaton imbalanced example of wish fulfillment we have seen time and time again in Hollywood, while it continues Apatow’s personal stamp of the Nice Guy that gets a girl purely based on the fact that he’s kind. Or, as, Elle Magazine writer Justine Harman describes the “Apatowian” nature of the “nerd revenge fantasy.” Or, as Dickson also describes, “formerly dorky dudes enacting their high school sexual fantasies.”
And so, Love begs the question: should a show be allowed waste your time for several episodes before actually getting to the heart of the series? Should it be allowed to enrage before qualifying itself with, “Don’t worry! We weren’t doing what you thought we were for the first three episodes! It’s okay now!”
In an already-saturated market, with new webseries and award-winning content springing up everywhere, from Hulu to Amazon to FX and back again, it can be hard to choose exactly what deserves watching. As the pool becomes increasingly bigger (National Geographic and Snapchat are two unlikely outlets that have both funded scripted content in the last year) the ability to discern between what I should and shouldn’t spend my time on is paramount if I ever hope to lead a functioning adult life. So for now, Love will remain unwatched in my Netflix queue — hopefully until Apatow decides not to perpetuate the hot girl/nerdy guy trope any more. At that point, Love will be just a bad and far-distant memory, with no bearing on the future, be it mine or anyone else’s.
Minnie Schedeen is a a junior majoring in cinema and media studies. Her column, “Film Fatale,” typically runs on Mondays.