100 Favorite Shows: #82 — Love Life
By: Dave Wheelroute
Tags: TV Shows, Love Life, Television, Lists, Hbo Max

Image from TV Insider

“I just want to be the kind of woman who knows what she wants.”

When streaming services launch, they’re expected to be accompanied by a preeminent scripted series. Apple TV+ bowed with The Morning Show in tow. Disney+ entered our lives with The Mandalorian leading the charge. And when HBO Max premiered on May 27, 2020, it launched with a rom-com anthology series entitled Love Life (sneaking in just under my list’s eligibility window). Created by Sam Boyd with producers Bridget Bedard and Paul Feig tapped behind the scenes, Love Life ushered in a new streaming service with what seemed like an average meet-cute, fall-in-love series starring Anna Kendrick as Darby Carter. As the series progressed (and demand grew), though, Love Life quickly revealed itself to be deep beyond its tropes and its first arc stuck the landing mightily in its tenth episode. A second season won’t revolve around Darby (William Jackson Harper is entering the fold), but it doesn’t have to. Her story is completed and there’s billions more love tales to be told.

(Spoilers lie ahead for the first season of Love Life. But you could probably guess them anyway.)

“Our love lives can quite easily be reduced to data,” the narrator of Love Life (Lesley Manville) begins in the series’ first episode, “Augie Jeong.” She parses through the data of the average amount of relationships experienced by lovers before finding “the one,” the number of long-term relationships, heartbreaks, and moments in which they fall in love. Quickly, though, Manville’s narration shifts from a statistical viewpoint to the idea of how each of these heartbreaks and love stakes surveyed also comes with a story behind it. After all, humans are humans and not one story is the same as any other, even if they’re reduced to the same romantic studies. In the age of speed-dating, romantic formulas, and apps that seek to calculate a match percentage, Love Life returns to the roots of one’s romances and finds the story behind all those numbers.

That’s why I was drawn to Love Life initially. I love a show that is full of heart by design and completely sincere in its depth of feeling. As the most recent show on this list, Love Life may be prone to recency bias over staying power, in my mind. Nothing about Love Life was necessarily revolutionary for the rom-com genre on television, but it was so earnestly crafted that I couldn’t help but be charmed by it. If you know me, you know Love Life is obviously a series I’d love. For one, Love Life told Darby’s story over the course of years, but in a period manner of years I was actually familiar with! (Episodes set in 2012 even reference Linsanity, which I distinctly recall unfolding over two weeks on SportsCenter.) One installment, “Augie Again,” even depicted Darby and Augie (Jin Ha) racing through the Christmas experience in New York! (The only show more tailor-made for my specific interests is Dash & Lily, which came out after the deadline!)

Love Life is everything I want in a romantic series. When HBO Max launched, they wisely constructed a limited series around talented creatives and a charming actor and just let them cook. The result was a worthy initial entrant into the HBO Max originals library, emphasizing an anthology that unfolded one story at a time, as if Modern Love was a novel for one person, rather than seven.

Image from Variety

The anthology structure is definitely present in Love Life, but more in the sense that Darby dates one character per episode. (“Bradley Field” sees Darby failing to make a relationship with her boss (Scoot McNairy) succeed; “Magnus Lund” ends with Magnus (Nick Thune) proposing to Darby.) At first, I was a bit wary (but certain I’d finish out the first season, at least), as the “relationship of the week” style left me feeling cold to most characters besides Darby and curious as to how one would resonate with me more than others.

However, as Darby began to accept that some relationships in her life simply weren’t meant to thrive, the episodes shifted in the second half and doubled down on characters we already knew. Magnus received a second installment. Augie did, too. Characters we’d already met (like Darby’s best friend, Sara Yang (Zoë Chao), and her mother, Claudia Hoffman (Hope Davis)) generated episodes constructed around their own goings-on, removed from Darby’s love life specifically. From there, Love Life was able to go deeper and prove itself worthy of launching an entire streaming service. Most importantly, it was worthy of Kendrick’s talents and her pervasive on-screen sweetness.

The penultimate episode, “Augie Again,” was also an effective installment for convincing the viewers that Augie might just turn out to be Darby’s soulmate, proving that a man from her past could still be a man for the future. When they reconnect at a potluck Thanksgiving hosted by their mutual friend, Jim (Peter Vack), Augie can’t help but remark to Darby, “You’re more beautiful than I remember.” Since they’d last met, Darby has grown through life and love experience, becoming a more self-assured, self-aware person. She looks, essentially, the same, but it’s the growth that positions her as more beautiful. From there, Darby and Augie hook up again and their honeymoon phase receives a redux.

By ingratiating their relationship to a do-over, though, Darby and Augie also ensured that they would face the same problems they did the first time. At the core of it, they’re just different people who want different things (it’s succinctly described when Darby acknowledges Augie’s potential to pack up and move to an isolated home in a faraway mountain and her proclivity for getting in bed by nine o’clock). When Darby begins to be worn down by Augie’s somewhat holier-than-thou mentality regarding climate change and pet adoption, she resigns to convincing herself that Augie is still a worthwhile boyfriend to keep around, but ultimately, we know there’s no warding off a break-up. Fortunately, it’s an amicable one, but it also shows that — no matter how much one attempts to will it so — you cannot force a soulmate. Marriage doesn’t produce a soulmate and neither does self-battered persuasion. Love may be a choice, but there’s also no substitute for a spark.

Image from The Wrap

As Darby grows her confidence to break things off with Augie, she also finds herself doing whatever she can to convince herself that she’s not pregnant, even when it’s observed by Jim (providing advice on Augie in a fittingly adult manner for his and Darby’s friendship) and confirmed by a bathroom sink littered with positive pregnancy tests. Even though the first season finale (“The Person,” penned by Bedard and Boyd) deals primarily with Darby’s soulmate, Grant (Kingsley Ben-Adir), a large portion is still devoted to the consequences of her pregnancy. A major sequence depicts Darby and Augie forcing themselves to stay awake and ignore their wailing baby throughout the night. Sleeping against the wall in their hallway, it’s clear that while many were fated to leave Darby, some were fated to stay. Augie, by virtue of their baby, Theo, is a part of Darby’s life forever — just not in a romantic capacity.

Obviously, the pregnancy was an unplanned one, as Darby can’t quite fathom how their caution was upended by Theo. But as we learn in “Claudia Hoffman,” the history of women in Darby’s family lineage is one that is marked by unplanned pregnancies (Darby, Claudia, and Claudia’s mother were all unplanned babies). Manville’s narration returns in this episode to ensure that we understand how important a mother’s love can be for a child, as it colors the love she gives and receives for the rest of her life. Unfortunately for Darby, the relationship between her and her mother is so fraught that she blames many of her lifelong shortcomings on the way she was raised.

“Claudia Hoffman” begins with Darby rushing to the hospital to have her appendix taken out and even though the procedure is routine, she still feels like she’d be comforted if her mother arrived to be there in the hospital to take care of her. (Darby is still not sure if her mother is quite capable of this, as she feels that her mother is “there” for Darby, but not really there. A physical presence can never eclipse emotional distance.) The feelings harbored by both women culminate as they go mattress shopping for Darby’s brother, Hunter (Jackson Demott Hill), and the easy bond Claudia forges with her son reduces Darby to tears.

It’s a mundane moment, but it’s also an effortless one and Darby pleads with her mother, “Why can’t you connect with me?” It’s not that her mother doesn’t want to connect (there’s no truth to that, but Darby emphasizes it’s how she feels, regardless), but rather that Claudia’s just unsure how to build a genuine bond of affection with her daughter when her own mother never did the same for her. In a sense, they’re both feeling the same thing: a fear of rejection and a worry that it’s not easy for them to love others. They’re both lonely, which is a truer source of their emotional divide than Claudia’s tendency to “criticize and overwhelm” Darby. Rather than attempting to defend one another from the truths being spoken, Darby and her mother accept their ailments and subvert them by speaking the love and want they harbor for one another.

Most of the time, these conversations result in arguments on television as the overbearing mother trope clashes with the free-spirited daughter trope. But they breach the divide with affection and pride, which is a testament to an open-minded bond, but also to the therapy that works for both of them. (We must always advocate for the merits of therapy.) A hug of understanding passes between Darby and Claudia before they move to another mattress and debate how Claudia should reply to a Tinder match. It’s baby steps, but steps are always what’s most crucial for Darby.

Image from 25YL

“I was going through this phase of being very mentally unwell,” Sophie Turner once explained when recalling the story of the breakup before her wedding with Joe Jonas. “[Joe] was like, ‘I can’t be with you until you love yourself. I can’t see you love me more than you love yourself.’” It’s a relationship experience shared between two mega-stars, yes, but it’s also one that should be considered in all romantic bonds. One must reconcile peace with oneself and one’s non-romantic loves (like Claudia Hoffman and Sara, whose episode deals with Darby forcing her friend to seek rehabilitation for her life-threatening alcoholism and loss of stability) before one can fully give herself over healthily to “the one.” Love Life is not about checking off the boxes of Manville’s data-based narration. It’s about showing how Darby grew to accept the love she deserved. Only then was she open to her soulmate entering her life.

At the beginning of “The Person,” it seemed like Darby had resigned herself to being someone who was unworthy of love. When she had Theo with Augie, Darby seemed to accept that this was what her life was meant for. She was meant to be only a mother who loved, rather than someone who also felt what it was like to be loved. There’s unspeakable nobility in motherhood, but the series is called Love Life, after all. What would it be without a resolution to Darby’s romantic escapades?

Right when Darby stopped looking for love at every turn is when she found it. (Isn’t that always how it goes?) At Sara’s wedding, years after the chronology of Love Life began, Darby reluctantly flirts with Grant (Ben-Adir has got to be the most thrilling romantic lead to come along since Henry Golding, perhaps even since Hugh Grant), never thinking there’s an actual chance of something long-term between the two of them. Before she realizes it, though, she’s completely fallen in love and Manville brings the series to a quaint, satisfying moment of “happily ever after.” It might not have always felt like a fairy tale, but Darby did find more than true love; she found inner peace and well-being. Grant is an astonishing human being, but if Darby was surveyed, he’d be another tally for romantic mathematics. Darby’s journey was about more than Grant; data never accounts for the love we find in ourselves.