Monday 21 March 2016

Mini Monday! - Love

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The show is about as interesting as its poster.
This new Netflix Original is a pile of self indulgent garbage.


Gillian Jacobs is great. In Community, she played Britta's ball of lovably misguided but well-intentioned self-righteous anger spectacularly well. Britta was by no means a good person (nor is the rest of the show's cast, which is half the point) but by god was she trying, and we loved her for it. This new show, Love, has her cast in a somewhat similar role as Mickey, a heavy-drinking twenty-something with no direction in life who works in a radio station. Oh wait, no, that's nothing like Britta and more like a bingo card for "most unimaginative, contrived, bullshit Judd Apatow comedy character ever". Hold on...holy crap. It is a Judd Apatow comedy! It all makes sense now.

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Each episode's script: *30 minutes of fart noises*
Mickey starts out as a reasonably relate-able but barely functioning human being and gradually descends over the course of ten episodes into a forced caricature of every type of addict in existence. She starts out by drinking too much, like every goddamn twenty-odd year old in existence, then gradually graduates to heavier drugs before miraculously realising out of nowhere in the last episode that she's not only an alcoholic and drug addict, but also a sex addict too, because I really don't know. This doesn't occur over the space of months or years by the by, the whole series takes place in a couple of weeks, so we're meant to assume that she was like this from the beginning, but maybe all of these addictive behaviours just went on holiday for the first few episodes or something? It's stupid, really really stupid. Oo, and then there's Paul Rust's Gus. Heh. My god... Have you ever wanted to watch a grown man snivel and whine his way through 5 Christ-fucking hours of your life like a ten year old with Tourette's? Maybe you would like to watch him systematically ruin his perfectly good career because he's a completely useless human being who throws tantrums at his boss and has absolutely no concept of what he should and shouldn't do. He's not funny, he's not sympathetic; he is the single worst, most horrifyingly written pile of steaming turd that has ever dropped unceremoniously out of the imagination of another human being like a frozen stowaway falling out of the landing gear of an Airbus A380 at 30'000 feet.

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I do not like this show.
My final paragraph will be about the show's writing; if you would like to save time, it's pretty much more of the above. Imagine if you fast-forwarded into the future to the age of about 60 and, along the way developed severe head trauma or some kind of brain defect. Now imagine trying, with your limited intellectual capacity and horrifyingly outdated concepts of what is and isn't hip/cool/happenin', to write a television show that appeals to the current generation of penniless students and man-children. Congratulations, you just wrote the remake to the criminally despicable Netflix show Love. The characters have an inexplicable obsession with taking Ubers and some other unnecessary and already outdated cultural phenomenon that I can't be bothered checking to see what it was. Point being, pop culture buzzwords replace actual characterisation or comedy and awkward Mexican standoffs and arguments replace comical timing or wit. It's everything I expect from a US comedy and less. I'm done here.

Overall Ben Equivalence Rating


I Don't Even Know... - Nothing compares to how disappointingly awful Love is. Although, maybe that was the cynical point they were trying to make all along... Nope. It's just plain shit.

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