New Netflix Series: Love

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The series will be a "down-to-earth look at dating," exploring male and female perspectives on romantic relationships through the characters Mickey and Gus, played by Jacobs and Rust respectively

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Judd Apatow’s movies tend to run rather long for romantic comedies, but that pales next to the canvas that’s available on “Love,” a 10-part Netflix series that follows the slow-gestating relationship between Gus and Mickey, as well as the assorted oddballs that surround them. Highly specific to L.A., for good and ill, the show revolves around frequently irritating protagonists that will present a challenge to viewers’ rooting interest, but there are enough moments of sheer awkwardness and bawdy humor to make this a series a core audience should be able to like, if not, you know, love.

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Love is messy. It's shaggy. It takes weird detours that only sometimes work, and on occasion it seems to be daring its audience to not only root against the central couple, but to question how many more episodes they might want to watch.

I can see all those issues, and more. I just don't care. When you feel it — as I very quickly did with Love — nothing else matters.

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Most of Love doesn't feel new, but it's committed and if you can shake the fact that there are a dozen shows with similar moves and if you can warm up to the prickly, but probably realistic, characters, there's a lot to like, if not love.

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On Netflix alone there are over 200 episodes of Friends, dozens of sappy Anne Hathaway or Katherine Heigl vehicles, and the service’s own recent original programming like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Master of None. We don’t need more romantic comedies at this point, and yet, Love is a show that was consistently surprising, delighting, and gutting. I couldn’t stop watching it and I want more of it immediately.

Coming from someone who was dearly in love with Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, as far as I’m concerned, Love completely knocks it out of the water. It comfortably finds a tone somewhere between Ansari’s series and Netflix’s BoJack Horseman. As a fan of the network’s darker programming, this is a very good thing, and it’s Love’sbrutally honest, unflinching point of view that is the series’ strongest asset.

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Sitcoms have committed many serious crimes against TV romance. To keep us enthralled during long series runs, couples we love are often subjected to torment that seems like unfunny wheel spinning: Ross and Rachel took a break; Niles had two wives before Daphne; and this season, Homer and Marge went through a trial separation. That history of dragging out coupling plots makes Netflix’s Love, co-created by Judd Apatow and premiering Feb. 19, an exciting discovery. The title is broad enough to imply sweeping ambition, but the brisk 10-episode series wants to do nothing more (and nothing less) than show the process by which two very specific people find solace in each other.

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