‘Everything I Know About Love’ Is a Better, British ‘Girls’

Imagine a version of Lena Dunham’s seminal Girls (yes, seminal, don’t argue) where Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) are the two leads. Two fan-favorites—one, a carefree-yet-lost soul; the other, an innocent, talkative ray of light. Picture these two at the helm of their very own series, and you’d have Peacock’s Everything I Know About Love.

Sounds enticing, right? It should, because Everything I Know About Love caters to every fan of Girls, Sex and the City, or The Sex Lives of College Girls. It’s four women dating, partying, working, and gossiping, all in one friend group riddled with the lowest of lows and the highest of highs (both drug-related and otherwise). TV series like these come around fairly often; still, there’s a reason to be grateful for them every time.

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The reason here is our two leads, longtime best friends Maggie (Emma Appleton) and Birdy (Bel Powley), who have enough BFF chemistry to greenlight a handful of seasons together. The pair is a tighter duo than any of the aforementioned series’ ladies, and as a result, watching the show feels like hanging out with your best friend. With frequent flashbacks to primary school days and giggly moments of pure glee, Everything I Know About Love will make you open your phone and text your best friend, “Hey, remember that time we…”

“Do you ever have it where you want to invent a new version of marriage, but it’s just with two people who promise to love each other forever?” Birdy theorizes about friendship in the first episode. “They don’t have sex or anything. They just hang out loads.”

But Maggie and Birdy are undergoing some big changes in their lives. They’ve just moved in with college pals Amara (Aliyah Odoffin) and Nell (Marli Siu), who, thankfully, contribute an added texture to their friendship. Maggie and Birdy, nearly jobless (they dress as pigs and dole out pamphlets on street corners), yearn for a more romantic life. Birdy’s never had a boyfriend. Maggie wants to find a way to party all the time, while also never losing money.

In the blink of an eye, their wishes are granted: Birdy begins a very serious relationship with Nathan (Ryan Bown), the roommate of Maggie’s brief fling. Maggie “finds” a job by sitting on the couch watching TV—a producer of the reality TV show she’s watching just so happens to be her landlord, and offers her a gig while patching up a hole in their ceiling. OK, maybe there’s a little Lena Dunham in Maggie.

As any first boyfriend might, Nathan drives a wedge between Maggie and Birdy. The whole “best friends driven apart by a significant other” cliché is a tale as old as time, but Everything I Know About Love makes it feel new again: Instead of simply fighting with Nathan in the living room, Maggie uses her other two roommates as sounding boards about how annoying it is that he’s over every damn night.

Though Emma Appleton is a fantastic party girl/leading lady, as always, it’s Bel Powley who steals the show. The Morning Show star has a knack for coming off as nervous-yet-optimistic; she mixes the perfect amount of confusion with allure. The other two ladies are also a hoot (Amara’s working at becoming a professional dancer, while Nell shakes off her boring relationship), but the show really shines when all four dance together, laugh together, love together. Whoever penned the phrase “live, laugh, love” was onto something.

Unfortunately, though, Everything I Know About Love spends so much time unpacking Maggie and Birdy’s relationship that it droops a bit in the B- and C-plots. Nell and Amara are rarely on screen in the first half of the series; while it’s fun to have Jessa and Shoshanna-types helm the series, without Marnie and Hannah, we lose a little bit of the Girls flair. Who else is going to do coke off a toilet in a neon yellow mesh top? Who’s going to cover Kanye West’s “Stronger” as a ballad for a crowd full of artsy types?

When Amara and Nell make a bigger entrance later on in the season,, they get to further develop both their own characters and the lead girls’ arcs. Everything I Know About Love really hits its stride around this halfway point, when chaos starts to bloom in every member of the apartment’s lives.

In Episode 5, for example, the flat throws a party. Think Girls Season 1—when Shosh accidentally does crack at a party in Bushwick and the whole episode goes off the rails. Here, Birdy wins a new salmon dish at work, exclaiming that she one day hopes to pass it down to her children. She decides that the prized piece will live safely in her bottom drawer for the next few years. Maggie forces her to display it at the party; later, Birdy catches Maggie snorting lines of coke off the porcelain platter. Birdy huffs and puffs out the front door.

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“I’m going to turn you guys into a reality show,” Maggie’s boss (who, for some reason, is drunk at said party) says, watching the whole thing plan out. This line likely inspired Dolly Alderton, the author of the book Everything I Know About Love is based upon, to craft this whole series in the first place. Along with penning her memoir, Alderton is now the creator on the show, too.

Everything I Know About Love takes from Alderton’s 2018 memoir of the same name, which follows a handful of millennials trying to figure out their lives in the midst of their twenties. As such, every episode begins with the same quote: “This work is inspired by real live events and real people (but fictionalised when life didn’t offer a good enough story).” This also lends itself to another big appeal of the showe: The story takes place in 2012, around the same time Girls debuted on HBO. Queue up the floral dress/leather jacket combo, the early days of Twitter, and old clunky MacBooks, please!

Every episode of Everything I Know About Love is longer than the standard 30 minutes given to Girls and Sex and the City, which, unfortunately, does leave the show feeling a bit bloated. But there’s so much promise for seasons to come—I don’t use this reference lightly, but there’s a to-be-realized hint of Fleabag in the friendship of Maggie and Birdy—that it’s worth hopping aboard the show now. Any series with abundant, era-appropriate needle drops, like “Oblivion” by Grimes and “Domino” by Jessie J, is a throwback I’ll gladly salute. Now, let’s see what 2013 brings these girls.

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