Is the Anna Kendrick rom-com ‘Love Life’ good enough to launch HBO Max?
“Love Life” is a pretty regular little show, a romantic comedy that makes a nice enough star vehicle for Anna Kendrick, who’s also a producer.
It’s the kind of thing you might stay and watch for a while if you happened upon it while channel surfing.
But a show to help launch a network? That’s a puzzler.
“Love Life” is one of the first original shows that will debut on HBO Max, the new streaming service that begins business on May 27. The show doesn’t exactly kick things off with a whimper — and there are some other new shows debuting, too — but it’s not a big bang, either.
“Meh” is one of those annoying words that quickly wore out its welcome. Here, it may have found its rightful home.
Kendrick plays Darby, who lives in New York and is, as one does, looking for love. She has friends whom she relies on for help (sometimes; their place in her life is not always clear), and — this is a necessary function of keeping the show going beyond a single episode — Darby doesn’t have much luck with romance.
‘Love Life’ sounds kind of like ‘Sex and the City.’ It’s not
Sounds kind of like “Sex and the City,” huh? Only kind of. It’s more like a younger cousin of that show, the cousin who never quite measures up.
The structure of the show, created by Sam Boyd, is such that in every episode (except one, which we’ll get to), Darby finds, and inevitably loses, a boyfriend. Sometimes a year passes between episodes, sometimes a couple months. In one episode we go back to her teenage years at boarding school, where we discover things about her past that might account for more serious problems than not being able to find the right partner in your 20s.
But this is not that kind of show. While the episodes aren’t interlocking, exactly, the stories told within them are related. But they’re related to Darby’s romantic journey more than anything else; all the details exist to serve that.
Meet guy. Lose guy. Repeat
In the first episode, Darby is living with roommates Sara (Zoë Chao) and Mallory (Sasha Compere). She starts dating Augie (Jin Ha), who writes for Politico (yay journalism). Things go well until they don’t. Lather, rinse, repeat.
OK, that’s a little harsh. The circumstances and situations are different, and one fellow, Magnus (Nick Thune), warrants two episodes, for reasons that involve spoilers. There’s also an episode dedicated to Darby’s mother (Hope Davis) that is infinitely more interesting, as is one that tackles the divergent paths taken by the increasingly responsible Darby, rising steadily in the gallery and auction world, and the spiraling Sara. (HBO Max sent eight of the season’s 10 episodes for review.)
Davis is quite good in unfortunately small doses, playing the mother as needy and, at least on some level, needed. There is a scene later in the season when she and Darby finally air their feelings in an unlikely place that showcases both actors.
Chao also gets a big episode in which she rises above the cliched portrayal of a young woman in trouble the writing would suggest. Chao makes Sara difficult to like — difficult to watch, even — as she throws away chances. That’s a good thing, if that’s not clear.
Anna Kendrick’s good, not great. So is the show
But it’s Kendrick’s show, and good for her tackling a character who’s often messier than the ones we’re used to seeing (the “Pitch Perfect” franchise, the brilliant “Up in the Air”). She certainly gives it her all, though she seems a touch off somehow. Maybe it’s the jumparound nature of the storytelling, so we never quite get a firm grasp of the character.
She’s good, no question. But great? No. And that’s true of “Love Life” as well. Early shows aren’t necessarily signature shows — no one thinks of HBO as the network of “Arli$$.” But with “Love Life,” HBO Max is making not so much of a splash as a ripple.