How Love evens the odds in the roman­tic com­e­dy stakes

Roman­tic come­dies tra­di­tion­al­ly skew heav­i­ly towards the per­spec­tive of the pro­tag­o­nist, which often trig­gers thin char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of the oppos­ing male or female char­ac­ter of the sto­ry. The clichéd arche­type of the Man­ic Pix­ie Dream Girl comes from the male point-of-view, where a female char­ac­ter is giv­en lit­tle or no depth beyond being quirky and desirable.

Alter­na­tive­ly, male love inter­ests in female-led rom-coms are often charm­ing every­man types who are over­looked until the time when our hero­ine realis­es the love of her life has been hid­ing in plain sight the entire time. It’s rare that we get to see a per­fect split in rela­tion­ship terms, where two char­ac­ters are allowed to devel­op as indi­vid­u­als before they come togeth­er as a cou­ple. The genre has a long­stand­ing bad habit of com­part­men­tal­is­ing people.

Netflix’s Love is a series that excels by slic­ing a rela­tion­ship clean in half, reveal­ing the fleshed out male and female per­spec­tives at its core.

It tells of the bur­geon­ing rela­tion­ship between Gus (Paul Rust) and Mick­ey (Gillian Jacobs), who begin to date but quick­ly arrive at the real­i­sa­tion that they don’t quite work togeth­er. Los Ange­les is the back­drop and the show rel­ish­es tak­ing satir­i­cal snipes at Hol­ly­wood, where Gus works as a tutor for a child star (Iris Apa­tow, daugh­ter of Love co-cre­ator, Judd). Mick­ey pro­duces a radio show that offers rela­tion­ship advice from a psy­chol­o­gist (Brett Gel­man) who thinks he has all the answers to her per­son­al prob­lems but real­ly just makes every­thing worse.

Love is the brain­child of Rust, Apa­tow and Les­ley Arfin, and it has a lot in com­mon with Apatow’s pre­vi­ous tele­vi­sion work – imag­ine what might have hap­pen to the char­ac­ters of Freaks and Geeks if they grew up and moved to LA. It has the mod­ern mil­len­ni­al slant of Girls only with­out the navel gaz­ing, with its deri­sion of the enter­tain­ment indus­try mark­ing it as a dis­tant cousin of The Lar­ry Sanders Show.

Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances we might yearn to see a smit­ten cou­ple togeth­er as much as pos­si­ble, but Love bal­ances the lives of Gus and Mick­ey so well that it’s just as grat­i­fy­ing to watch them in their dai­ly lives. Love pulls us into the orbit of Gus and Mickey’s pro­fes­sion­al and social lives so that we get a sense of where they’re com­ing from when they meet. Ear­ly on in the first sea­son it’s revealed that Gus has a ten­den­cy to awk­ward­ly sab­o­tage attrac­tive oppor­tu­ni­ties that come his way, while Mickey’s var­i­ous addic­tions repeat­ed­ly throw her life into chaos.

Cru­cial­ly, we get to see the best and worst of these char­ac­ters before the sparks start fly­ing. It’s not a sur­prise when they bond over their griev­ances or clash because of a minor dis­agree­ment – we’re get­ting the know them at the same pace at which the nar­ra­tive requires them to click. This is espe­cial­ly impor­tant in Mickey’s case, because all too often the female protagonist’s per­spec­tive is neglect­ed in shows such as this. Just look at the way Cobie Smul­ders’ Robyn is fre­quent­ly suf­fo­cat­ed by the dom­i­nant male per­spec­tive of Josh Radnor’s Ted in How I Met Your Moth­er.

Bal­ance mat­ters when telling these kinds of sto­ries, not least because it allows us to form a cohe­sive under­stand­ing of the halves that make the whole. By strik­ing a more even, nuanced per­spec­tive between its two roman­tic leads, Love cap­tures the rare thrill get­ting to know some­one, and even­tu­al­ly lov­ing them, in a more authen­tic, nat­ur­al way.