Love and bingeing through the lockdown

Lockdown, I’ve discovered, is a good time for a Love binge.

No, no, not that kind. I’m talking about bingeing on TV series about Love. And there are three we’ve been enjoying recently on that theme. One of them goes so far as to take the remarkably original title, Love.

Only one of them is new, so you may know them anyway. But just in case, here are my recommendations.

Johnny Flynn and Antonia Thomas in Lovesick
Having fun (left) and not so much (right)

Let’s start with Lovesick, a British series, jointly produced by Channel 4 and Netflix. It’s based in Glasgow (though you have to work that out for yourselves, and the accents are almost all English). It’s still available on Netflix.

The premise amused me: a young man (Johnny Fynn) diagnosed with chlamydia has to contact all his sexual partners of the last several years, of whom despite his obvious emotional clumsiness and ineptitude in relationship-building, it turns out there are a large number.

He’s surrounded by a diverse crew of friends, including the would-be gigolo (Daniel Ings) who’d rather not be (OK, you have to watch the series to get that), the friend (Joshua McGuire) for whom every relationship is long-term until it blows up in his face, and the young woman (Antonia Thomas) whose attraction for one particular young man (no, no spoilers here) is veiled by a series of attachments that could never prove as satisfactory.

Around them is a string of secondary characters with their idiosyncrasies and their peculiar stories which keep the series moving nicely through its 22 episodes in three seasons (originally released between 2014 and 2018). Cleverly, all the characters occasionally do things that are off-putting, but then win their way back into our affections in other, more attractive ways. 

Overall, there wasn’t a character I didn’t feel I liked, at least most of the time. Which is a great relief, since I’ve seen – and abandoned – plenty of series where I feel that no one appeals to me.

Mae Martin and Lisa Kudrow in Feel Good
Charlotte Ritchie is behind them

The second series is new (released in 2020), with only one six-episode season so far. Feel Good is also British, and made jointly by Channel 4 and Netflix. There’s no confirmation of a second season yet, though it would surprise me if there weren’t one (though perhaps delayed by coronavirus).

It’s a semi-autobiographical look at the life of the acting lead and co-writer (with Joe Hampson) of the show, Mae Martin. She’s a Canadian-born stand-up comic, based in Britain since 2011.

Martin’s a good standup and we got some amusing comedy scenes (not quite as many or as extended as in The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, but nonetheless of the same general kind). She’s also an attractively complex individual, who resists being categorised as either bisexual or lesbian, and identifies as either non-binary or a woman, using the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘they’. No problem there, as I’ll use whatever pronoun about them that she wants.

From the first episode, Mae gets into a new relationship with a straight woman (Charlotte Ritchie), ironically called George, and the rest of the season takes us on a roller coaster ride of their relationship, mixed in with the problems of coping with addiction (or with an addicted friend) and of handling the stereotypically awful British family of George’s friends.

Everything’s treated with a deft and light touch, making the even some difficult scenes beautifully comic. There’s also a wonderful performance by Lisa Kudrow as Mae’s mother (she says her own parents are nothing like the depiction in the series, and I can only say, just as well). An unusual, quirky and beautifully funny series.

Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust in Love
Their roller coaster has troughs as well as peaks

Finally, there’s that series with the startlingly distinctive title, Love. That name’s so distinctive that, for the first time ever, I couldn’t use the title to track the entry down on IMDB.

You don’t know IMDB? It’s the best, most comprehensive internet movie database there is. Funnily enough, that’s what IMDB stands for, by the way.

The only way to search for it, I found, was to look for the name of Paul Rust, and then pick the series title from the list of his filmography. That’s quite appropriate, as it happens, since Rust is a highly talented individual, who’s both an accomplished scriptwriter and a fine actor. He’s the co-creator, one of the producers and a star of the show.

His co-star is Gillian Jacobs as the wacky non-conformist with the addicted personality (yep, we get some addiction in this series too), who has a bit of a rocky ride with Rust’s character. Like Lovesick, there’s a large collection of secondary characters, each funny in his/her/their way (see? I’m learning about personal pronouns). And, again like Lovesick, the behaviour of the main characters makes them absolutely unbearable at some moments, though at others they redeem themselves, so you can’t help sympathising with them generally.

I have to confess that we’ve only watched season 1 so far, but we’ve enjoyed it enormously. It’s a Netflix series that ran from 2016 to 2018, with 34 episodes over three series. My suspicion is that when we get to the end, I shall feel as many others have, that it was cancelled too soon.

Still, it has all the qualities one needs to get through some more of the Lockdown with sanity undisturbed…

Good dishes from traditional ingredients: the bingeworthy Jack Ryan series

In cooking, we mostly use the same ingredients and the genius, if we have any, is to make something better from them than others do. Or than we did last time.

Some particularly smart chefs, of course, sometimes find a new ingredient, perhaps a new spice, that brings a different and previously unimagined flavour to a dish. But mostly, what distinguishes them is that they do things better than others with the same raw materials.

What’s true of clever cooking can also be true of clever film-making. That’s the case of the Jack Ryan series, the Amazon creation of which the second season was released on Prime at the beginning of the month.

John Krasinski (right) as Jack Ryan, with
Wendell Pierce as his nominal boss, actually sidekick, James Greer

The ingredients are the standard ones of the genre – the spy action movie. Men whose real talents are underestimated by their superiors and are bound to a desk though, as we shall soon discover, they’re unbeatable in the (violent) field, exquisitely skilful with a gun and their ability to outfox the wiliest of opponents. The wiliest of opponents up to their devious and nefarious best to inflict terrible damage on the good guys (generally the US) on behalf of some very bad guys (vicious jihadists or corrupt South American autocrats). Good guys who, with a handful of people or even a single good guy, can take on practically an army of bad guys, wiping them all out at no more than a scratch or a couple of injuries to their side.

‘Injuries’ being a relative term, in any case, as on the side of the good guys even a bullet wound is insufficient to keep them out of action for more than few hours.

Above all, and this is particularly a specialty of American films of this type, there are traitors everywhere. Take that guy who rescues the protagonist from a pit of alligators (I speak metaphorically here: this is no spoiler). Expect to discover later that he’s in the pay of the other side and will hand that same protagonist over for torture and (possibly) execution by his vile accomplices at a critical point in the twisting plot.

So there’s nothing new in the Jack Ryan universe. What the series relies on is ingenuity in how the old ingredients are put together. And that, to my astonishment, both seasons do spectacularly well. It means the stories are compelling, the action fast-paced and engaging, even the suspense is gripping – however old the devices, somehow I found myself wondering how things were going to turn out, even though a different part of my brain was telling me I already knew.

Like a good meal made from traditional ingredients, the cookery for Jack Ryan works well. It produces highly palatable dishes, well worth trying. They teach nothing, they offer no insights, but they’re highly enjoyable.

What’s more, the second series is as much fun as the first.

If you have access to Prime and you like a quickfire, amusing and tense yarn, you could do a lot worse than spend two or three evenings bingeing on this series.