Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Everything I Know About Love’ On Peacock, Where Young Transplants To London Find Love In The Most Unexpected Places

The “pretty young people hanging out in the big city looking for love” genre aims to show audiences that, while being young and in the city can be spectacularly fun, it carries with it an inherent loneliness. People are hard to please and picky, so despite millions of people being around them, they can’t find anyone to spend time with outside their friend circle. A new Peacock series that debuted on BBC One earlier this year takes this idea into a new direction, examining how a friendship can give you all the love you might want.

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As a young woman runs to catch a train, we hear her say in voice over, “Destiny… the thing that I believe predetermined all great love stories, the idea that the romantic events of our lives were scripted in stardust long, long ago.”

The Gist: Maggie (Emma Appleton) is reflecting back to 2012, when she was 24 and moving to a shared London flat with Birdy (Bel Powley), her best friend since they were kids, and their college friends Amara (Aliyah Odoffin) and Nell (Marli Siu). On that train she catches, she says events will be set in motion that have made her past decade a great ride and taught her a lot about love, though not in the ways you might not expect.

On the train to London, she has a meet-cute with a musician named Street (Connor Finch), a pretentious musician that seems to push all of Maggie’s romantic buttons. They kiss at the station in London, but she decides to leave their meeting again to fate instead of, you know, getting his phone number or last name.

Two weeks into the friends’ life in London, they’re having a great time, going to pubs and clubs, doing some light blow and just talking over people. Maggie and Birdy talk each other up to strangers in a pub, trying to find a word for the platonic love the two of them have for each other. “Friendship?” asks one of the beleaguered strangers. Maggie runs into Street, who dismisses the fact that they live in Camden, says some stupid things about smartphones and generally acts like a prat. Maggie is thrilled.

When she goes to “listen to records” with Street, she is so happy about her situation, that she decides to set up the buttoned up Birdy, who’s never been on a proper date, with Street’s brotastic flatmate Nathan (Ryan Brown). Nathan invites Birdy to dinner, something that Maggie thinks is “creepy” for a blind date. But she pumps up her BFF, telling her how spectacular she is. When she has a bit of a meltdown on the phone with Street, Maggie’s horny desperation goes into overdrive, when she stumbles into Birdy’s room topless to find that Birdy isn’t alone.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Even though Everything I Know About Love is based on the book by Dolly Alderton (who also created the series), it gives off strong vibes of many other hangout shows from the past decade, from Girls to How I Met Your Father.

Our Take: There’s a lot about Everything I Know About Love that’s utterly charming, starting with Powley as the seemingly unassuming Birdy, who thinks she’s no fun and doesn’t have anything interesting to say to a date, but can get picked up with one pep talk from her soulmate Maggie.

Maggie and Birdy’s friendship is also one of the show’s main attractions; by showing such a supportive loving union, Alderton shows that people who are looking for love may find something more fulfilling in their friendships than in any romantic love that they’re searching for, a message that should make any lovelorn twentysomething take heart.

But the path for Maggie to get to this point is going to feel like a series of romantic failures that will start to seem the same after a while, punctuated by Maggie’s efforts to match her personality to whomever she’s dating. With Street, for instance, she admits she’s being a “try hard”, doing impressions of Neko Case while wearing a yellow feather jacket to try to keep him from thinking she’s some sort of pedestrian suburban know-nothing.

It’s tiring to watch her self-sabotage through the first episode, just as it’s tiring to see her strain to be hip. It’s also tiring to see her discourage Birdy from “settling” with Nathan, thinking he’s like a “plug adapter,” something you need but don’t want to spend too much money on. Given her spotty romantic history, it seems that dissuading Birdy from dating Nathan would be a pretty obvious case of her not being a friend, but she just doesn’t see it. Those are the kinds of character traits that made us start to hate Lena Dunham’s character on Girls, and we’re seeing similar red flags here.

What we hope to see is more of the “girlmance” between Maggie and Birdy, as well as a little more about the lives of Amara and Nell, and we hope to see some of the hipster, judgy part of Maggie fall away as she sees how much of a wanker Street is and how spectacularly Birdy is thriving since meeting Nathan.

Sex and Skin: Besides Maggie parading around the flat topless, dancing to Cymande’s “Lovers On The Slide” before going into Birdy’s room, there’s nothing.

Parting Shot: After seeing Birdy in bed with Nathan, Maggie reverses her stance about not being Street’s midnight booty call, runs to his flat, and kisses him as soon as he answers the door.

Sleeper Star: The music coordinator, Iain Cooke, has certainly put together one of the cooler soundtracks for a show this year, even if the songs might feel a bit too beyond the characters’ years.

Most Pilot-y Line: “You were really lame in school, weren’t you?” says Street as he gets close to Maggie. Wow, not sure how Maggie didn’t see that question as a red flag.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The friendship at the center of Everything I Know About Love is what is going to fuel the show and keep it flying off into just showing hipster nonsense. But the first episode felt much longer than its 43-minute runtime because of all that hipster nonsense.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.