100 Favorite Shows: #93 — Love
“I had a really nice time tonight. I’m sorry I don’t believe in magic.”
To coincide with the vibes of Valentine’s Day in 2016, Netflix released all ten episodes of the first season of Love. A second season was already in the works by this release, as Netflix was excited to get in on the ongoing glut of television romantic comedies. Created by Judd Apatow, Lesley Arfin, and Paul Rust (who also starred as Gus on the show), Love aimed to take a more grounded approach to modern dating through the lens of Gus and Mickey (Gillian Jacobs). It lasted for three seasons (in patented Netflix fashion) with a final arc coming in March 2018. It was never a major streaming phenomenon, but it was a light reprieve from the increasingly epic scope of many other television comedies.
(If you haven’t seen Love, but don’t want spoilers for it, this essay might not be the one for you.)
It’s interesting to track the history of the rom-com. You have the older stories with rat-a-tat dialogue like His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby. Eventually, Nora Ephron’s sensibilities would take a stranglehold on the genre with films like When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle. This opened up the gauntlet for rom-coms as they became an oversaturated genre onto their own. There were good films in the rom-com boom of the 2000s (50 First Dates, Music and Lyrics), but there were also a lot more clunkers than there used to be (Must Love Dogs, License to Wed). Eventually, the boom died down until it was revived in a major way on television.
I’m not talking about the will-they/won’t-they of Sam and Diane on Cheers or Ross and Rachel on Friends. I’m talking about the new rom-com boom of series that were specifically focused on the main relationship. Ensembles were reduced and B-plots were frequently nonessential in the face of the two romantic leads and the ins and outs of their relationship. Shows like You’re the Worst, The Mindy Project, and, of course, Love took the rom-com format and stretched it out over the course of an entire series. With this, characters could use more than two hours to meet, grow close, fall apart, and reconcile. They had tons of episodes to navigate all different sides of a relationship. Sometimes, they would break up. Other times, they’d argue and stick it out. It allowed for relationships to be depicted much more realistically.
And for someone in my demographic, Love might have been the most realistic of them all. I’m a straight, white male in my early twenties who is not self-destructive, so Love was made for people like me (though always accessible for all). My class standing mirrors the one Apatow is frequently targeting in his shows and films. It’s why I gravitated towards Love (that and my fondness for Rust and Jacobs), along with some friends of similar backgrounds who were drawn to Love as an all-time classic, in their estimation.
The depiction of love in Love was grounded in something you’d likely experienced before. It was very white and very millennial-centric, but it was also comforting and safe. For all the big expectations from a show that dares to call itself Love, Love was never trying to tackle a definitive depiction of the feeling. It was just trying to be an easy, breezy blend of some “early twenties” life events and some asshole characters learning to quell their own selfishness to better love one another.
Gus and Mickey (both of their names are also the names of cartoon Disney mice, by the way) are not only assholes; they seem to be completely mismatched. Gus is exceedingly pretentious with a constant need to be right about everything. Mickey is brazenly selfish and blames others for her own insecurities. The only things they have in common are their own impulsiveness and their lack of trust placed in other people. (In “Shrooms,” Mickey says she doesn’t fully trust people who haven’t experienced a drug trip. Gus doesn’t trust people who haven’t seen Die Hard.)
In cinematic rom-coms, the characters have to be likable. Writers and directors only have two hours to tell a story and they have to win over the audience with their characters pretty early on. In the rom-coms on television in the 2010s, this wasn’t necessarily imperative. Gus and Mickey were both humorous creations, but they also seemed to be intentionally unlikable with the goal of seeing them grow over time to the point where fans wouldn’t say, “Ugh, those people are the worst. They deserve each other.” Instead, they’d say, “Aw, Gus and Mickey can be so sweet together. They really do deserve each other.” There was more time to build to that and earn it on Love. After all, no human being is as fully-formed as a lead movie character, who springs from the screen as a well-defined human.
The realness that Rust and Jacobs brought to Gus and Mickey allowed for the nuances of a relationship to shine through. One of their early dates (in “Magic), which consists of just hanging out at Mickey’s home, is a bit stilted. Gus isn’t entirely comfortable. Mickey doesn’t exactly know what conversation to have. (It also starts with Gus remarking that Mickey hanging out with her friends was like walking into his sister’s sleepover: “a cool vibe.”) It eventually leads to their sex feeling forced and their trip to The Magic Castle resulting in an outright disaster.
The rigidity of being a member at The Magic Castle is too close to Gus’ identity and it results in some truly hard-to-watch tension between the two of them, to the point where it seems like Gus might be intentionally spoiling his romantic chances with Mickey. She, in turn, spoils a magic trick and he takes personal offense to it. On top of it all, she asks for his jacket and he’s too wary of breaking the rules to give it to her. For as much as Gus always needed to be right, it seemed like Mickey was close to being uniformly correct about every social foible between the two of them. On their car ride home from The Magic Castle, she asserts herself (she didn’t want to go to The Magic Castle in the first place) and says that Gus cannot force her to go somewhere and then “demand a specific reaction” from her. Mickey is absolutely right and Gus knows it, but he’s still too hung up on the fact that she doesn’t like magic as much as him to actually internalize that.
The insufferable nature of both characters (“Magic,” however, was more of a condemnation on Gus and Gus-esque men in relationships) can be a bit much, but it’s fortunately (and frequently) juxtaposed against the sweetness of Mickey’s roommate, Bertie (Claudia O’Doherty).
On the surface, Bertie comes across entirely innocent, but in reality, this innocence is more of a lack of world-weariness than anything. An American transplant from Australia, Bertie is less jaded to new experiences than Mickey is and she’s still enthralled by the proposal of how much she still has to experience in her life, from the more special things (falling in love) to the rites of passage in her construction of adulthood (tripping on shrooms).
“Shrooms,” from the early stages of season two, is probably my favorite episode. The whole half-hour exudes the sense that these actors (or, at least, the writers) have an experience of these drugs from when they were younger. From the vibe in Mickey’s house when the drugs come out to the ways in which Mickey reacts to their antics while tripping (Gus and Bertie move a table, Randy is obsessed with dinosaurs and chases a coyote), the entire sequence felt very real, just as all of the episodes had to that point.
Furthermore, “Shrooms” is loaded with some great laugh moments. Mickey mentions that she had fun at Legoland while on shrooms in her days prior to her sobriety. Gus replies that he had fun at Legoland completely sober. Later, when the mushrooms are placed into sandwiches to mask their foul taste, Randy (Mike Mitchell), Bertie’s boyfriend, remarks, “It’s actually just a really a good sandwich.” When Randy follows the coyote to break into someone else’s home and sleep in their bed, Gus screams (for one of the only times in his life) in Randy’s face to convince him to get out before the homeowners return.
“Shrooms” also makes for an excellent turning point in the relationships of Gus and Mickey and Bertie and Randy. As Bertie grows to be more comfortable with her personality and her setting, she slowly sheds the need to be with Randy just to be in a relationship with someone. Clearly more mature than him, Bertie is right to grow more and more dismissive of Randy from the shrooms night onward. Conversely, Gus and Mickey grow closer through the drug trip.
In “Party in the Hills,” with Gus finally parted from Natalie (Milana Vayntrub), he makes a move on Mickey, only to be set up by Mickey to date Bertie instead. Bertie is the type of person who’s more interested in magic, like Gus. In “Shrooms,” they also share a common interest in Working Girl and proclaim that they’ll be friends forever after connecting over the film. While their interests are supremely similar, it’s clear that they wouldn’t be right for each other romantically. By the episode, “Andy,” Mickey and Gus have decided to give their own pairing a shot and it’s clearly the right choice. Gus and Bertie are compatible as friends because they share the same interests, but Gus and Mickey are compatible as lovers because they share the same values. It’s a key difference, but it’s why they can weather a tough go-around at The Magic Castle; they’re both looking for each other.
Throughout “Shrooms,” Mickey justifies being around people tripping while dealing with her own sobriety. It gets to the point where she tries to join them on shrooms and Gus (albeit a bit fucked up at the moment) manages to wrestle the mushroom away from her and eat it himself. The moment is one that could’ve pissed off Mickey, but ultimately, she recognizes how close she was to relapse and that Gus didn’t even think before stepping in between her and her loss of sobriety. They make for a good team, pushing each other close to the ledge and pulling back from it in tandem. They grew enough through the second season and a third to understand that their intentions are well-meaning, if often executed poorly.
Instead of spinning into an argument, the shrooms moment becomes a relationship deepening one. As Gus comes down from his trip, he remarks about the classical beauty of Mickey, comparing her to a cinema star from the 1940s. It’s a moment of sweetness that doesn’t work without the prior barrage of annoyances and Mickey’s dangerous trip to the ledge because all of these actions were sincere. It was all the more charming when the sweetness was genuine, too.
Ultimately, that’s what I loved the most about Love. Yes, I appreciated the sensibilities of Earwolf and Comedy Bang! Bang! (from Rust to Jacobs to O’Doherty to Seth Morris to Briga Heelan to Kulap Vilaysack to Horatio Sanz to Drew Tarver) combining with the Apatow multiverse (pulling Daniel Stern as Mickey’s father and David Spade (in an excellent turn) as the father of Gus’ student, Arya (Iris Apatow)) and Arfin’s contemporary talents. But I also loved the grounded nature of Love’s stories. Any show with the name, Love, might have aimed for the center field fence with a romance of grandiosity. Instead, Love depicted the daily elements of love that make it love. Just like its characters, it was not without its faults, but it helped show that rom-coms could reflect tribulations as much as jubilations. Even if they didn’t find much of the latter in The Magic Castle. Love isn’t always magic and neither was Love.
(Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, so there will be no new essay. Instead, check back Friday for #92!)
