Love: Apathetic to Apatow

We focus on two leads, Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (Paul Rust). Each is an early thirties person working in the entertainment industry and each, shockingly, is looking for love! The entire premiere follows the two of them in parallel timelines as they deal with various elements of relationships, work, and demons. 

Gus is a nerdy beta-male to the utmost extreme. The show goes out of its way to show him as awkward and small, making him walk around with a backpack that looks like he's still in high school and shirts that show off just how slender he is. However, like most characters on television who are such nerds, he's also a good guy, always one to shower his partner in "I love you" and affection. Sure, he doesn't have a great sense of humor and he isn't any kind of exciting spontaneous fellow, but rest assured, Gus is a decent human. Meanwhile, Mickey, the female lead, is opposite in just about every sense. Where Gus is rather unattractive, Mickey is ridiculously gorgeous. Where Gus is somewhat shy and quiet, Mickey is constantly saying "fuck, shit, fuckers, shitfuck" like she's in a Quentin Tarantino movie. And where Gus is at least trying to get himself into a happy relationship, Mickey is continuously in a relationship with a fat, bald, drug addict who lives with his parents. In other words, Gus is a likable nerd and Mickey is a gorgeous trainwreck (though with much less wit and charm than Amy Schumer's character in the recent Judd Apatow movie Trainwreck.) 

Throughout the course of the pilot we see respective jobs, with Gus working as a sort of floor boss in a production set, being constantly pushed around by his coworkers, and Mickey working as a sort of floor boss for a radio psychologist played by the great Brett Gelman who stands out as the highlight of the show. Mickey is tasked with firing an employee while Gus is tasked with managing several workers who seem to have no respect for him whatsoever. However, most of these scenes are plain exposition and nothing else. Though there are somewhat comedic situations, none of them actually spark any laughter, instead delivering cringes. 

Relationship wise, the aforementioned drug addled man who lives with his mother is in an on again off again romance with Mickey, though most of their scenes together are spent having over-the-top rough sex, usually spliced in with Gus having boring, fully clothed, sex with his ostensibly normal girlfriend. It's like a toned down Fish Called Wanda montage for millennials. However, very quickly into the episode, Gus's girlfriend admits to cheating on him, ending their relationship early, while Mickey spends most of the premiere trying to make nice with a man who seems to have zero redeemable qualities. And, to make matters worse, the show never even tries to explain how or why Mickey wants to be with him! To us, he's an ugly drug addict without any money who, for some reason, our well-paid, pretty protagonist likes. I don't mean to say it's all about looks, but there's not a line in the episode that even goes into a surface level explanation of what draws the two together.

Gus, on the other hand, fresh off of his breakup, is invited to a "kickback" in his apartment complex by a group of attractive exchange students in return for giving them back their Frisbee. I'll ignore the term "kickback" and move on. At the same time, Mickey's drug addicted boyfriend tries to make nice with her by inviting her to a weird church wherein a man who reminded me of Holy Wayne from The Leftovers preaches about the importance of love. Both characters get themselves into precarious situations at their nighttime activities, with Mickey taking ambien before the church and then shouting at Holy Wayne and Gus somehow getting himself into bed with two attractive sisters who want to have a threesome, only to cringe-inducingly manage to screw it up.

After each character's unsuccessful night, the two stumble drearily to a convenience store where Mickey tries to buy coffee without money, only for the unsuspecting Gus to pay for it. Gee, I wonder where the plot could go from this chance encounter? 

Shrugging off the obvious cliches of the nice nerd meets hot screwup by chance and a rocky relationship forms plotline, Love struggles to make either of the characters, even the one who is supposedly the nice one, likable or root-for-able. Mickey is the greater of the two evils, spending most of the premiere cursing, taking drugs, and having uncomfortable sex with her awful boyfriend. Gillian Jacobs sells it well enough, but most of the acting involves excessive eye rolls and outbursts. I'm certainly no prude when it comes to cursing (Deadwood is one of my very favorite shows,) but most of Mickey's f-bombs just seem unnecessary - there to fill the space of dialogue that would require more thought from the writers. Nothing about her character made me root for her to succeed and none of the jokes made me root for her to fill the screen more to make me laugh either. What we're left with is an empty character whom the majority of the show is spent upon. Likewise, though Gus isn't as unlikable as Mickey, nothing about him is particularly appealing either. Like Mickey, he's not very funny, and like the show, his narrative goals seem overdone and boring. There's nothing inherently wrong with Gus, or with Paul Rust's performance for that matter, but the character just has nothing to make us interested in seeing any more.

I can see the appeal of Love, I really can. An Apatow show about two young people, each with their own problems, who have a realistically difficult relationship is good in theory, but to make it succeed, it must draw more comedy and more drama to give the show a heart or at the very least, a funny bone. With characters not worth following and jokes not worth laughing at, Love comes off as bland as it's title.

Love isn't irredeemable, and there's a good chance that it is sharpens and becomes its own animal in the coming episodes, but as a premiere, there's just not enough to inspire further viewing.