More Reasons to Love ‘Love’
Love returns for a second season on Netflix on Friday, and the Judd Apatow-produced comedy-with-drama is even stronger this time around, featuring a great, complex performance by Gillian Jacobs that I’m going to do my best to avoid describing as “fearless.” Why? Because too frequently, saying that a woman gives a fearless performance is code for “she’s playing a real mess” or — as one male character actually does describe Jacobs’s character, Mickey — “a f***ing nightmare.”
Related: Judd Apatow Talks ‘Girls,’ ‘Crashing,’ and the Return of ‘Love’
The show, co-created by Apatow, Lesley Arfin, and co-star Paul Rust, picks up right where Season 1 left off: Mickey has told Rust’s Gus that she’s a “sex-and-love addict” as well as an alcoholic; this has not dissuaded Gus from remaining attracted to her. You watch wondering how much of this new relationship is about an essentially meek man dazzled by a woman who elbows through life boldly; how much does the attraction involve a fascination with a “difficult woman” on his part, while to her, he’s something of a comfy elf. (On a recent visit to The Late Show, Rust told host Stephen Colbert that there’s a disconnect between his name — that “Paul Rust” conjures up an image of a tough guy, a detective with a scar, perhaps — and his outward appearance. On the contrary, Rust said, he sometimes feels he should have been christened “Lilypad Jones.”)
The new season is built, to a large extent, around Mickey’s recovery process. She attends Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings (she says you should pronounce SLAA as “slaw”) and AA meetings. She remains the sober companion when three characters do mushrooms. She gets irritated with Gus when he’s super-supportive, and irritated with him when she feels he’s not supportive enough — urging him, for example, to attend Al-Anon meetings to better understand her. At her job at a Los Angeles radio station, she’s trying to decide whether the work bores her or if she’d enjoy it more if she weren’t so reflexively cynical about the station and its employees — particularly the middle-aged horndog on-air advice therapist Dr. Greg, played with superb oiliness by Brett Gelman, who also writes a couple of Love episodes.
Gus, for his part, is aware of his own tendency to be passive, both with Mickey and in his work life. He continues to be an on-set tutor to a young TV actress, Arya (played with a thorny believability by Iris Apatow), while nurturing his dream to be a screenwriter.
The new season introduces us to Arya’s father — David Spade doing his grinning-weasel thing — and, more importantly for the series, Mickey’s father. He’s played by Daniel Stern in a great episode in which you can see in the dad’s boisterous neglect the source of so much of Mickey’s ambivalence about commitment and the truth. Mad Men’s Rich Sommer is wonderfully manipulative and low-simmer-hostile as Mickey’s ex-boyfriend. And as long as I’m listing guest stars, Andy Dick shows up as Andy Dick, who needs — what else? — AA “advice” from Mickey, which inevitably ends with Mickey saying to him, “No, we are never going to make out.”
The degree to which you enjoy Love may depend upon your threshold for awkward situations and, on a deeper level, your own romantic history. If you’ve never had some close variation on a Mickey or a Gus in your life, you might find it hard to identify. I’ve encountered people who’ve told me they find both characters unlikable, which only made me like Gus and Mickey more.
I love the way Love presents Los Angeles as an endless car ride from restaurant to movie theater to sun-dappled park. I love Mickey’s roommate, the polite, plucky, adventurous Bertie (Claudia O’Doherty). I love the jokes about the marriage of Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall. I love the music that tags the end of every episode — that Apatow has reminded me that Fleetwood Mac’s “What Makes You Think You’re the One” and Loudon Wainwright III’s “Donations” are great songs.
I’m also super-psyched that someone on television has attacked a phrase I dislike intensely in real life: the use of “I’m so proud of you” intended as praise, but which almost invariably can be revealed as condescension. Or as Mickey succinctly puts it, “If he says ‘I’m proud of you’ one more time, I’m gonna slit his f***in’ throat.” I gobbled down all 12 episodes of Love, and hope you do too, because there’s a cliffhanger season-ending that is actually very suspenseful, if not downright scary.
Love Season 2 begins streaming on Netflix on Friday.
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