‘Love’ proves captivating — even though it’s probably all wrong

Television loves starcrossed-lover comedies, but the new Netflix series “Love” is different: One reason that its protagonists can’t seem to find romantic harmony is that they’re wrong for each other, and possibly everyone else as well.

At first, the series, whose 10-episode first season is available to stream on Friday, seems to follow the playbook employed by other contemporary comedies such as “You’re the Worst,” “About a Boy,” “Wilfred” and many others. Gus (series co-creator Paul Rust) is an on-set tutor who’s just been dumped by his latest girlfriend and runs into hyper-loose cannon Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) in a convenience store. He’s a scrawny, Woody Allen-esque nerd who likes to hang out with other members of his species inventing title songs for movies that don’t have title songs, like “Carlito’s Way.” She’s a drug, booze, love and sex addict who’s having trouble breaking up with her current sometime-boyfriend, who lives with his mom and is addicted to cocaine.

There’s a certain appealing vulnerability to each character that prompts us to think at least for a while that maybe we want to see these two social misfits get together. That’s what Rust and his co-creators, Lesley Arfin (Rust’s real-life wife) and Judd Apatow want us to think. Yes, old Lysander never was more spot-on than when he observed that “the course of true love never did run smooth.” But his modernday counterparts — Rust, Arfin and Apatow— are out to amend that a bit: The course of dysfunctional love never did run smooth, or short, for that matter. Mickey and Gus dance around each other for several episodes, but the more the writers stretch things out, the more we begin to doubt the wisdom of these two ever pairing up.

At the moment, Gus works on the set of a hit TV show called “Witchita,” about witches. He mostly hangs around the set talking to the craft service guy Kevin ( Jordan Rock), who is looking for his big break playing “the reliable black guy” but keeps getting turned down when he auditions. Meanwhile, he’s the “reliable black guy” on “Love,” offering Gus advice on how to survive the crazy politics of the TV world and how to score with women. When Gus thinks about expressing his interest in Mickey via the written word, Kevin stops him with the observation, “Nothing dries up a vagina more than a paragraph.” And when “Witchita” cast member Heidi (Briga Heelan) flirts with him, Kevin waves Gus off by telling him, “Any chick with a head shot is out of her mind.”

For three hours a day, Gus gets to try to tutor the insufferably self-indulgent child star of “Witchita,” Aria (an uncannily deft Iris Apatow), but secretly he yearns to be a TV writer.

After their convenience-store meeting, Gus texts Mickey the ubiquitously eloquent, “sup?” but doesn’t hear back for days. That’s because Mickey is bouncing from crisis to crisis as usual. She does get a new roommate, a gleefully forthright Aussie named Bertie (the divine Claudia O’Doherty), but her various addictions provide a far-too-convenient distraction from taking responsibility for anything in her life. She spends an evening cavorting in the LA subway with Andy Dick, meets up with her sort-of ex-boyfriend Eric at a new-age, cultish church when she’s hopped up on Ambien and bangs her boss, Dr. Greg (Brett Gelman), who hosts a love and relationships advice show on radio, because she figures once she’s slept with him, he can’t fire her as his program manager.

Gus may seem the more stable of the star-crossed would-be lovers, but it’s telling that both his former girlfriend and Mickey separately point out how “pretend nice” he is. He’s also so prone to selfdestruction that we find ourselves caught in a near constant cringe waiting for him to do something stupid. Nine times out of 10, we don’t have to wait long.

Although Gus goes out of his way to announce that he’s not Jewish and that he went to Catholic school, there’s no getting around the fact that his is a contemporary take on Woody Allen’s early career roles in films, such as Alvy Singer in “Annie Hall.” You find yourself wondering how a Catholic nebisch like Gus can even think he’s in the same league as a looker like Mickey, until you realize she’s even more socially inept than he is.

Even if the creators had stuck to the traditional pattern of star-crossedlover romances, instead of turning it on its ear, “Love” would probably be almost as lovable as it ends up being. That’s because of great writing and great performances.

There are a few moments of over-indulgence on the writers’ parts— the entire Andy Dick episode, for one — but nothing that seriously harms the show. With seamless direction by the likes of John Slattery, Steve Buscemi and Dean Holland, Jacobs and Rust are so good they make you indifferent to the fact that “Love” is yet another show incestuously set in the entertainment business. The supporting cast is equally top-notch. It must have been so much fun for all of them just to speak the lines that Arfin, Rust and Apatow crafted for them. But it’s even more fun for us to hear them.

How does it all end? You can be the judge, but the show was guaranteed a second season even before its premiere, so that just means there will be more to “Love” next year.