Rust is well-cast to nerd-connoisseur type: He’s skinny and floppy-haired, like a mop that a wizard brought to life, and carries himself like he would like to have an intense discussion of his ranked list of Coen Brothers films. Jacobs’s Mickey has a prickly melancholy, like a more naturalistic version of her Britta Perry from “Community.” Mr. Apatow’s movies.īut “Love” is a funny, winning version of the format, and the casting is spot on. Hulu’s “The Mindy Project” embraces movie myths while dismantling them, FXX’s “You’re the Worst” explores the chemistry of self-destructiveness, Amazon’s “Catastrophe” is a variation on the gimlet-eyed raunch of Mr. “Love” is hardly the first revisionist rom-com to hit TV. Gus, a nebbishy aspiring screenwriter and tutor for a TV child star, is being forced out of a dull relationship by a girlfriend (Milana Vayntrub) tired of his “fake nice” passive-aggressiveness. Mickey, a self-help radio-show producer and sometime 12-stepper, is dumping her latest bad-choice lover, a coke addict living with his parents.

Apatow’s supersized movies - bringing Mickey ( Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (Mr. The first episode spends around 40 minutes - the sitcom equivalent of one of Mr. Sweet and awkward, hopeful and cringe-inducing, it slows down the arc of a single romance like a frame-by-frame replay of a car crash and asks whether that collision is a disaster or a happy accident. “Love,” whose first season arrives Friday, is created by Judd Apatow, bard of the pop-savvy rom-com, along with Lesley Arfin (“Girls”) and Paul Rust, who also co-stars.

The genre is built on the tension between fate and circumstance: Two people are meant to be together, but the plot keeps them out of sync until divine order is restored.īut what if fate is just a concept we impose on accidents of timing? What if love is never “meant to be,” so much as it’s the product of will and coincidence and hard work? These questions, not so much cynical as realistic, connect “ Love” on Netflix and “Togetherness” on HBO, a pair of bittersweet candy hearts about romance among the Los Angeles creative class. In comedy, they say timing is everything.

Love and friendship review new yorker