Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love, Accidentally’ on Freevee, A Rom-Com Starring The Always Delightful Brenda Song

Freevee, formerly known as IMDb TV, is Amazon’s latest gamble in the streaming landscape. It is, as you may have guessed, entirely free even though they are pouring some money into original content. Love Accidentally is their foray into the rom-com and stars a friendly face in Brenda Song. So should you figure out how to navigate yet another streaming app to watch this?

LOVE, ACCIDENTALLY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Alexa (Brenda Song) and Jason (Aaron O’Connell) are work nemeses vying for the same advertising account and a promotion. They’re also living somewhat parallel personal lives: both of them got dumped on the same day. When Alexa accidentally texts Jason (thinking it’s her best friend’s number) about her broken heart, they unknowingly strike up an online romance and aren’t sure whether they should risk breaking the spell to meet in person.

What Will It Remind You Of?: Enemies to lovers is a rom-com trope for the ages. This film also treads similar ground to the acclaimed Netflix original Set It Up as it places that dynamic in a workplace setting, but unfortunately doesn’t have the same charm as that one did.

Performance Worth Watching: Alexa and Jason’s work besties also happen to be their only friends, and are both quite charming in their small roles. Pedro Correa as Brad is especially fun as he pokes fun at Jason’s increasing feelings with the mystery girl.

Memorable Dialogue: There is some excitement about who will text first and they’re both glued to their phones. When Jason’s phone goes off, he and Brad are excited for a moment until he realizes it’s his mom. “I had a grilled cheese for lunch, mom,” he recites into a voice memo. Classic.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: It’s not shocking that this film is a low budget rom-com — it is airing on Freevee after all. But while it retreads the beats of some of our favorite films of the genre by leaning into the enemies to lovers plot and giving them a work crisis to navigate, there’s not much charm in the burgeoning romance. It’s cheesy, which isn’t a fault on its own, but doesn’t back itself up with the heart it thinks it’s delivering.

It was inevitable that at some point in the film, one of them will realize that they’re in fact texting their work enemy, and have to deal with the fallout and change their behavior according to their new feelings. The problem in Love Accidentally is that after establishing that Jason is pretty much a Grade A asshole, he suddenly begins treating Alexa with kindness and respect long before he figures out the phone number swap. The character development doesn’t track with who he is presented to be in the first half of the film, and wholly undermines the frenemies to lovers plotline.

There’s plenty else to nitpick: the characters somehow live in a world where you didn’t need someone’s area code for their phone number (kind of like we did in the ’90s), they carry around gigantic “Sense & Sensibility” books, and they seem to only have their one respective work friend to lean on in tough times. The dialogue is cheesy and underwritten, and they use voice memos for texting to an annoying extent. Moreover, the film under-uses Brenda Song who is due for a more exciting role after showing us her chops as London Tipton in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. Song and O’Connell don’t really have chemistry to carry the film, which is a travesty because the world can always use more rom-coms.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The film lacks chemistry between the leads and doesn’t do justice to the classic enemies to lovers trope.

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Paste Magazine, Teen Vogue, Vulture and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.