SummaryEach season this anthology series created by Sam Boyd focuses on one person's search for love. In season one, 20-something Darby (Anna Kendrick) searches for love in New York.
SummaryEach season this anthology series created by Sam Boyd focuses on one person's search for love. In season one, 20-something Darby (Anna Kendrick) searches for love in New York.
Creator Sam Boyd has given us a female protagonist who is not only very familiar, she seems to be living by a set of rules that are distressingly outdated. ... Love Life is at its best when it examines how Darby's non-romantic connections influence her approach to finding a significant other.
She and the scriptwriters have a tall order making the undulations of one stranger's love life interesting enough to sustain ten half-hour episodes. I'm not sure I'd stick that for my dearest friend. But it really does get better as it progresses.
One would like to be less conscious of the fact that Darby is living a lie, or a series of them, or indeed is a character in a TV series; nevertheless, anyone who has has been in a relationship of any length will find some behavior here to accuse themselves of. ... Kendrick is well cast, and as an excuse to hang out in her company, “Love Life,” frustrating as it sometimes is, will do.
“Love Life” has its mild virtues for rom-com addicts who enjoy a good meet-cute every now and again. But the anthology show, starring and executive produced by Anna Kendrick, trades in tropes that are as overused on TV as the word “tropes” is in TV criticism. ... The flatness of the plot turns, many of which recall the less sexual arcs in “Sex and the City,” is compensated, to some degree, by the characters and the actors surrounding Darby.
It's a toothless, dull proof-of-concept that any network or service could have produced, made more worrisome if it's also meant to be a toothless, dull proof-of-concept for HBO Max. ... The semi-remarkable thing is how frequently Kendrick holds the show together. She's funny even when the scripts aren't.
Love Life does what it sets out to do as well as possible, but is unable to get over a truly killer hurdle early on: the characters in this show are insufferable.