Showtime’s ‘I Love That for You’: TV Review

Angie Han
·6 min read

By the time we meet a teenage Joanna (Sophie Pollono) in the opening minutes of Showtime’s I Love That for You, she’s already figured out how to make the most of her unfortunate status as a child cancer patient. She smoothly guilt-trips a nurse (Tara Karsian) into handing over most of a birthday cookie-cake, and her parents (Matt Malloy and Bess Armstrong) into buying her a gold bracelet after she sees Special Value Network host Jackie (Molly Shannon) talking it up on TV. She may be sick, but she has it made.

It’s trying to figure out how to build an identity beyond her diagnosis that’ll prove a challenge for the adult Joanna (Vanessa Bayer, who co-created the series with Jeremy Beiler), 20 cancer-free but sheltered years later. And while I Love That for You sometimes seems as wobbly on its journey of self-discovery as she does, both it and Joanna are saved by a bittersweet sense of sincerity.

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Joanna’s chance at a new life comes when she lands her dream job as an SVN host in Pennsylvania, undeniably a glamorous upgrade from her previous existence handing out Costco samples while living at home with her parents in Ohio. Best of all, she gets to work closely with Jackie, who’s every bit as friendly and capable as she’d seemed on TV — though some of her other new colleagues, like mean-girl host Beth Anne (Ayden Mayeri) or ice-queen CEO Patricia (Jenifer Lewis), are significantly less welcoming.

However, moving on proves to be easier said than done when, in a moment of professional crisis late in the series premiere, Joanna blurts out that her cancer has returned. The lie works even better than she could have dreamed, bringing her sympathy, office perks and (maybe most importantly for her burgeoning career) an identifiable personal brand through which to hawk blouses and faux florals. But it’s only a matter of time before the truth is revealed, and in the meantime the deception forces Joanna back into the role she’d worked so hard to transcend.

I Love That for You, which is loosely inspired by Bayer’s own experiences of childhood leukemia, finds both humor and poignancy in Joanna’s wide-eyed awkwardness as an outsider — not just to the well-oiled SVN office but seemingly to any world beyond the one she was tucked into when she first got sick all those years ago, to the point where she has almost no hobbies, friends or dating experience.

Which can be amusing, when it manifests as Joanna reassuring a dude (Jason Schwartzman) in the first episode that she’d never move states without discussing it with him first, only for him to remind her that they’ve just been on two dates (three if you count their run-in at Walgreens). And which then becomes achingly sad when, a couple episodes later, Joanna confides in Jackie that she’s “never really pictured myself as someone’s girlfriend, as the person somebody likes the most.”

Jackie’s gentle response — “Why not? Why not you?” — could be the whispered motto for any number of storylines in the series. Joanna might be living the biggest lie of all, but the gap between who she seems to be and who she really is or wants to be is echoed in Jackie’s own unhappiness about being forced to keep quiet about her recent divorce onscreen, lest it conflict with her marketable image as the cool, hip, “together” friend. Or in the longing stare that executive assistant Darcy (Matt Rogers) casts on his boss Patricia’s $15,000 Hermes handbag, coveting not so much the bag as what it represents — the life of a power player who can afford to treat herself to a $15,000 Hermes handbag just because she feels like it.

But the series struggles, often, to settle on a tone to unite its many different modes. I Love That for You never dwells very long on the heavy drama, at least in the first three episodes sent to critics, but nor does it seem to know what kind of comedy it’s aiming for. At times it calls to mind Bayer’s appearance on I Think You Should Leave, like when she flirts by describing herself as “this full diaper of a woman,” minus the committed absurdity. Other times it tilts toward satire a la The Other Two (which also stars Shannon, in a role not too far removed from Jackie), as with Patricia’s tendency to name-drop the likes of Mark Cuban, Eric Adams and her “late friend” Bernie Madoff, but without the bite.

For that matter, it’s not even clear what I Love That for You wants to say about the world it’s set in. The glimpse it offers at the inner workings of SVN is intriguing, if not necessarily very detail-oriented or realistic. (Among other things, we get very little sense of how a total newbie like Joanna landed this gig in the first place.) But when Jackie takes Joanna on a tour of the warehouse and sighs, “Do you know that I went to the Sistine Chapel once and I felt nothing, but when I come in here, it’s my heaven,” the line just hangs — it’s hard to suss out whether we’re meant to laugh at her or with her, to find her admission endearing or off-putting.

Perhaps it’s just meant to be a nice moment of connection for Shannon and Bayer, who share such warm-hearted chemistry that they feel like they could have been mother and daughter in another life. The show does take seriously the connection between the hosts and their cadre of viewers: When Joanna shyly shows Jackie the bracelet she brought from her as a teen, the emotions are played as completely earnest, even if it is a little bit funny when Joanna tearfully echoes the marketing line that the herringbone pattern “really has an air of sophistication.”

It’s in moments like those that the series’ heart seems most cracked open, hinting at the unplumbed tragicomic depths of a childhood experience that left Joanna feeling like Jackie — a woman who, until very recently, Joanna had only known as a smiling face selling her cosmetics or handbags on television — was her first real friend. I Love That for You makes for an incomplete and occasionally frustrating portrait of Joanna in the early episodes, but then so does Joanna’s own understanding of herself. With some patience and brutal self-honesty, it could yet evolve into something more.

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