Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love Life’ On HBO Max, Where Anna Kendrick Plays A Woman Going Through Her Major Relationships In Her 20s

May 27 is HBO Max day, the launch day of WarnerMedia’s new mega streaming service. Its first original series for grownups is Love Life, where Anna Kendrick plays a twentysomething whose journey through the standard love pitfalls should lead her to “the one,” or at least an adult, fulfilling relationship. But is it the kind of show that should launch a streaming service? Read on for more…

LOVE LIFE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As we see shots of various couples in intimate situations, we hear a narrator (Lesley Manville) say “Our love lives can quite easily be reduced to data.” She goes on to explain that by the time the average person meets the love of their life, they will have been in 7 relationships, a combination of long-term, short-term, and one-night stands.

The Gist: “Yet behind those numbers is a much bigger story,” says the narrator, as we’re introduced to Darby Carter (Anna Kendrick). Her parents divorced when she was four, and she was shuttled back and forth between her parents’ respective houses for so long that she felt she was always staying in hotels, craving connections with people. She moved to New York to attend college, and had some fun but “slightly empty” flings for awhile, but now she’s looking for something more, “where you wear what you’re wearing because you are who you are.”

We pick up her story in 2012, when she’s fresh out of college, living in an unrealistically-huge West Village loft with her roommates Sara Yang (Zoë Chao) and Mallory Moore (Sasha Compère), along with the constant presence of Sara’s boyfriend Jim (Peter Vack). Sara brings her to a karaoke party for Jim’s coworkers at Politico, where she meets Augie Jeong (Jin Ha), a handsome hipster journalist wearing a Knicks beanie. They hit it off immediately and sleep together the first night. But she feels like the connection she had with Augie could lead to something, to the point where she tells her boss Bradley (Scoot McNairy) and his fiancee Kate (Maureen Sebastian), that he’ll be the plus-one at their wedding.

However, it takes days for him to get back in touch with her, through which she tortures herself. Sara knows that Darby shouldn’t make that first text, while Mallory feels those rules are old-fashioned. When Augie does get back to her, though, their relationship starts to take off, to the point where they’re already using the bathroom in each other’s presence after only a few weeks. She even gets into watching the Knicks with him, as Linsanity is in full swing. It feels like they’re starting the type of real relationship that she’s been longing for.

But just as things are getting great, Augie drops a bomb: Politico has asked him to go on the presidential campaign trail and eventually settle in Washington to cover Obama if he gets reelected, and he’s reluctant to do the long-distance thing. His last night in New York is the wedding, and, while he tries to stay in the moment, Darby picks a fight in a futile effort to make their separation easier to handle. But they eventually come back together, knowing that this is the best it’s been for both of them as adults, and are sad when Augie gets on the bus to start his new assignment.

Our Take: Love Life is designed to be an anthology that traces the relationships of a different subject every season. Created by Sam Boyd (Paul Feig, Bridget Bedard, Jesse Henderson and Kendrick are the other executive producers), it’s a bit of an odd choice to launch a momentous service such as HBO Max. Other recent streaming launches have used splashier original shows to kick its service off — Apple used The Morning Show, Disney used The Mandalorian, Quibi used… well, let’s skip Quibi. But Love Life is a watchable, if predictable, romantic comedy that distinguishes itself through its performances and the fact that it treats love in a more realistic way than we’ve seen in similar series. But splashy, it’s not.

This is certainly the best we’ve seen of Kendrick in quite some time, probably since her Oscar-nominated role in Up In The Air 11 years ago. All those years of the Pitch Perfect and Trolls franchises have made us forget that she has considerable acting skills, with the ability to channel subtle emotions through her facial expressions (which we realized are very Julia Louis-Dreyfus-esque) and vocal inflections.

She plays Darby as someone who may not think she’s good enough to deserve love, but she also isn’t pathetic. Even when she does things that are immature and embarrassing, like in episode 2 when she dates a newly-divorced Bradley and gets drunk at his father’s wake, she’s doing it in a realistically immature way. In a lot of ways, Darby just isn’t ready to be a grown-up, as most millennials in her situation realized. Her relationships, whether it’s with her old boss, or this fling she calls “Danny Two Phones”, or even her mother Claudia (Hope Davis), succeed in normal ways and fail in normal ways. Darby’s journey to “getting it right” feels like the same one a lot of us went on in our 20s, and that’s refreshing.

We also get to see Sara’s struggles with adulthood, despite being in a stable relationship with Jim. He wants to take it to the next level but she doesn’t, because she’s not ready to grow up yet. But when her friends start to get the hang of adulting and she can’t, her conflict is stark, and Chao does an excellent job with that conflict.

So, as we said, the show is very watchable; in fact, my wife and I binged the first 8 episodes over the holiday weekend. But it is not an event series by any means, despite the presence of Kendrick, and we’re not sure why this likeable but light show is the one that launches HBO Max’s adult scripted original slate.

Sex and Skin: We see some nakedness from Augie, but Darby is covered. There’s some slight nudity on the series as a whole, and we see sexual movements creatively shot, but there’s relatively little skin.

Parting Shot: As Darby walks down the street after seeing Augie off, we see an older version of her, obviously very pregnant. “Darby doesn’t know it yet, but her person is out there. Maybe she’s met them already. Maybe she hasn’t. But they are alive in this city, and looking for her too,” says the narrator. “It will all happen for her. Just not in the way she thinks it will.”

Sleeper Star: Chao is the pick here, for the reasons we mention above, but also because she’s not just the “best friend” but could have her own show. Maybe Season 2, if there is one, will be about Sara.

Most Pilot-y Line: As much as we love Lesley Manville, the use of the narrator is a little too intrusive, especially in the early going. I’d rather see what’s going on than have it explained to me.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Love Life is pretty good show that has fine performances, starting with an Emmy-worthy turn from Kendrick. But it’s certainly not going to blow you away, and it feels like a soft way for HBO Max to launch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Love Life On HBO Max