ANOTHER STREAM HITS THE AIRWAVES
HBO Max rolls in with Love Life, a surprisingly deep romantic dramedy starring Anna Kendrick
Love Life
Streaming, Crave
Oh, the things that go ping in the night, when my phone alerts me that one or another of TV’S fabulous streaming services has extracted its monthly fee from my bank account. It always seems to happen in the wee hours — Ping! That was Netflix. Ping! That was Hulu. Ping — CBS All Access. Ping — Disney+. Ping — Apple TV+. Ping, ping, ping!
Now comes HBO Max, which launched Wednesday with a whole lot of promises for an additional $14.99 per month (PING!) and boasting a vast TV and film archive that will eventually harness the full power of all things Warner. That includes the libraries of HBO shows past and present and the movie and cartoon bounty within the Warner Bros. and Turner vaults.
The Max Original shows premièring with Wednesday’s rollout don’t exactly signal a dire need to immediately switch. Sesame Street’s Elmo has his own talk show (The Not Too Late Show With Elmo), there are new Looney Tunes cartoon shorts aspiring to the classic style, and there are a couple of reality competition shows (one about crafting, the other about voguing). There’s On the Record, a documentary film about a music executive and others who accuse hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons of sexual assault; plus the U.S. première of a British dramedy about a throuple (Trigonometry), because no matter how many streaming services pop up, there will always be a fresh supply of foreign programming to add to it.
But the show receiving the heaviest promotional push — HBO Max’s marquee offering at the moment — is Love Life, a romantic dramedy billed as an anthology series, focusing each season on one character’s ups and downs with dating and relationships. In this case, that’s Anna Kendrick in the role of Darby Carter, a young New Yorker going through all the clichés one typically attributes to girl-in-thebig-city narratives: She shares an apartment with a few friends, meets and gets involved with various men and learns as much as one can learn through the myopia of one’s self-centred 20s.
Love Life, created by Sam Boyd, initially seems like a dumbing-down of the HBO ethos, a lesser mash-up of Sex and the City and Girls — and the very sort of thing HBO aficionados feared when AT&T first stated its intention to turn up the heat on the prestige network’s creative burners.
The first three episodes of Love Life that premièred Wednesday (out of 10 total episodes, eight of which were made available for this review) do seem a bit rote, if well-polished, and geared toward millennial heartache. With irritatingly detached narration from British actress Lesley Manville, we are asked to view Darby’s love life through a prism of statistics and quasi-scientific claptrap. The “average person,” we are told, experiences seven significant relationships in her or his adult life, two of which are long-term, everything else falling under the wide category of “casual.”
Without spoiling too much, Darby hews to the average; each episode is named for her current love interest, beginning in her more naive days of 2012, meeting a guy at a karaoke party. We work forward from there, up through the years, which Love Life portrays with a breezy and believable pace. The actors who play Darby’s lovers are particularly well-cast, including Scoot Mcnairy (Halt and Catch Fire) as an older boss-turned-boyfriend.
Just when a viewer thinks the show is mainly frosting with little to no cake, Love Life steers into far more substantial and surprising territory. By the middle episodes, Darby hits some real road bumps, seguing from her Not-quite-rights to a deceptive Mr. Wrong, providing a chance for one episode to flash back to high school, where the capricious rejection from one boy has a determining effect on Darby’s future relationships. We start to understand her just as she starts to understand herself.