Love Life is reinventing the romcom: It's Sex and the City for millennials

Mic

The Sam Boyd-created HBO Max romantic comedy anthology series "is lightly narrated by a wise, charming storybook voice that gives insight into the statistics of dating and the complexities of human behavior, and each episode is framed like a chapter, with a specific supporting character as the focus," says Chloe Stillwell. "It felt like the logical evolution of the twee mumblecore romcoms that came out of the early 2010s — a show tailored to speak to millennials who at this point are no longer young, but not yet old either. But as its second season has now come to a close, it’s proving to be something else entirely. Love Life is Sex and the City for millennials. Perhaps that is in no way what Love Life intended to be, and at its current level of fandom, it certainly isn’t yet the cultural juggernaut that SATC had established itself as after two seasons. But it could become that if people give its smart dialogue, pithy cultural commentary and honest portrayal of dating a chance. Because Love Life features what worked about SATC, but evolves what didn’t — it brings the subversive cultural commentary and relatable portrayal of honest sex lives of SATC into the modern age, while letting the show’s gross pitfalls, like its singular focus on white people, racist undertones, queerphobia and classism, fall away. And of course, the excitement of watching young professionals wade through establishing careers and managing social lives in New York City is a thread that connects both narratives. Part of what makes LL compulsively watchable is the fleeting nature of its plot lines that mirror the way people naturally weave in and out of our lives. Much like in real life, the drama of the show can hinge on a misinterpreted text just as easily as a chance run in with an old flame while you’re moving your current partner’s car. Where SATC saw its main characters, especially Carrie, in an exhausting, constant search for 'the one,' LL shows its characters feeling their way through a series of 'ones,' which is much more reflective of how picking a partner works these days. Additionally for millennials, the old traditions of marriage are less weighty, gender stereotypes have evolved and concepts like soulmates are generally understood as antiquated, and LL seems to deeply understand that evolution. For SATC life was what happened while you looked for love, but in LL love is what happens while you live your life."