After a Limp First Season, William Jackson Harper Revitalizes HBO Max Rom-Com Anthology Love Life
It’s an previous story. Simply once you suppose you understand the place your life is heading, any person comes alongside and shoves you off that secure, acquainted path and onto a brand new one. One such transition shapes the good second season of Love Life, an HBO Max anthology collection that follows the romantic travails of a brand new character in every season.
This version’s protagonist, Marcus Watkins, a married ebook editor performed by William Jackson Harper, meets his potential soulmate Mia Hines (Jessica Williams) at a marriage. (Season 1 viewers will acknowledge Anna Kendrick’s Darby because the bride.) Small speak results in an “emotional affair” that hastens the top of Marcus’ marriage. As an alternative of navigating his new path with Mia, nevertheless, as he’d hoped to do, he’s left misplaced within the woods, not simply single, but in addition basically confused about who he’s and what he needs out of life. The state of affairs yields a far brisker story than Kendrick’s generic single-girl-in-the-city story.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Like its predecessor, the season, which debuts Oct. 28, speeds via Marcus’ entanglements on the price of roughly one per episode, from the keen however inexperienced faculty woman (Aline Mayagoitia) to the older magnificence who pays for fancy resort rooms (Leslie Bibb). However at its core is the identification disaster his emotions for Mia set into movement. Uncomfortable in his personal pores and skin; bored with having to show his authenticity to folks, just like the cocky younger creator he’s courting, who decide him for not being “Black sufficient”; and exhausted by white individuals who evaluate him to Obama, Marcus additionally has a strained relationship together with his hard-to-please dad (John Earl Jelks). (In a candy casting alternative, Janet Hubert, The Recent Prince of Bel-Air’s unique Aunt Viv, performs his mother.) That pressure doesn’t appear in any respect unrelated to his battle to outline Black masculinity on his personal phrases.
As Mia drifts out and in of his life, hauling her personal truckload of luggage, it’s via introspection, expertise and private accountability that Marcus approaches that elusive high quality: maturity. Love Life isn’t the primary rom-com to hint a personality’s belated emotional coming-of-age via successive relationships, but Harper’s delicate, unaffected efficiency and the perception with which the folks in his life are written and solid put it aside from the glibness of rom-coms like John Cusack’s Excessive Constancy. Punkie Johnson is a selected standout as Marcus’ lady-killer sister Ida, whereas her SNL castmate Ego Nwodim brings nuance and empathy to Ola, a New Age-y, Afrocentric playwright girlfriend of Marcus’ who may need in any other case come off as a caricature.
Onscreen romance has advanced fairly a bit since The Philadelphia Story—and even since Notting Hill. We’ve seen the style diversify with motion pictures like Loopy Wealthy Asians and reveals like Insecure. The L Phrase, Wanting and The Half of It have explored queer love in all its many incarnations. And but, we nonetheless don’t see many love tales that study the difficulties a person, not to mention a Black man, may need to work via in forming an identification impartial of his long-term companion. There isn’t any male equal to Alice Doesn’t Dwell Right here Anymore. HBO’s gender-flipped remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage felt compelled.
There are good the explanation why discovering oneself post-breakup has grow to be an archetypally feminine narrative. Even once we aren’t extracting ourselves from abusive or domineering companions, ladies face distinctive strain to please. However we’re not the one ones compelled to outline ourselves inside a system purpose-built to accommodate individuals who don’t share our identification. Whether or not he’s placing up together with his white boss’s microaggressions or contorting himself to suit Ola’s idealized conception of “Black love,” the Marcus we meet lives largely on different folks’s phrases. Solely in interrogating all the things about his life—his household, his friendships and his profession, in addition to his romantic relationships—can he grow to be an individual who’s prepared for actual love. As RuPaul would possibly say: should you can’t fulfill your individual emotional wants, how the hell are you gonna fulfill anybody else’s?
