Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Should've):Love Life.

"I'm in love again. Been like this before. I'm in love again. This time's true I'm sure" - Love You More, Buzzcocks.

"By the time the average person ends up with the love of their life they will have been in seven relationships. Of those two are often long-term relationships while the rest are a mix of short term flings, casual dating, and one-night stands. The average person will also fall in love two of those times and have their heart broken twice as well"

At least that's what the unseen narrator, actually regular Mike Leigh collaborator Lesley Manville, tells us at the start of each of the ten roughly half hour episodes of Sam Boyd's Love Life (BBC1 and iPlayer), a series in which we follow Darby Carter (Anna Kendrick, last seen by this viewer in Chris Morris' The Day Shall Come) as she proves these statistics to be almost exactly correct.

The problem with this premise is that nobody is average and it's to the great credit of Boyd, his team, and the cast that Love Life, patronising and condescending narration that's nowhere near as arch as it likes to think it is and would be more at home on a children's wildlife documentary aside, itself is far from average.  

It captures, realistically and often movingly, the awkwardness of first kisses, first sexual encounters, first mornings in bed together, the first time you meet a new partner's friends, and that warm glow that comes with a new connection as relationships move into a happier and more contented phase. It's also not shy of showing the pain of break ups, the anxiety caused by ghosting, the hurting of rejection, the hollowness of heartbreak, and how we all eventually bounce back from these moments.

Love Life widens its remit to take in Darby's relationships with her friends Sara (Zoe Chao), Jim (Peter Vack), and Mallory (Sasha Compere) and her mother Claudia (Hope Davis) and these are all played out excellently as well. At least after a fashion. To begin with it seemed as if Sara and Mallory acted more as a Greek chorus, there to provide unnecessary exposition, than they did real friends with their own foibles, motivations, and idiosyncrasies.

Recent romantic dramas like Normal People (and even comedies like Dave) have made friends crucial to the action and to the narrative development of the leading characters and, thankfully, as Love Life developed so did the characters of Mallory, Jim, and, most of all, Sara who even, like Claudia, had a whole episode devoted to her, her love of the party lifestyle in the big city (Love Life is set in a vibrant pre-pandemic New York City), and her issues with her eventual rejection by Jim whose heart is set on a future built around suburbia, stability, and children.

This makes for an excellent side story but the bulk of the narrative is taken up by Darby's attempts to find, and sustain, lasting love in the big city. Anna Kendrick's great in the role. Relatably cute and always in great outfits, the nervous laughter, vague expressions, and the uncertainty of her youth slowly mature into the more confident, successful, and emotionally intelligent woman she becomes even if there's always a glimpse of the vulnerability at her core.

We see her dip behind a tree to take an anxiety poo in a friend's front yard, get horrendously and embarrassingly pissed at a boyfriend's father's wake, we see here watching Pornhub with a dildo, sitting on the face of a casual partner, claiming to be "too full to fuck" after a huge dinner, and lying to a potential suitor that she's moving to Cleveland so she won't have to go and see Andrew Dice Clay or eat Mexican food with him. We see how each different man in her life treats her and we see how she responds to both that treatment and to them as people. 

Sometimes she's the one getting hurt and sometimes she's the one doing the hurting - just as it is for everyone. She meets lover number one Augie Jeong (Jin Ha) in a karaoke bar and they duet on Leona Lewis' Bleeding Love. Augie's big into musical theatre and loves his mum but is he into Darby as much as she's into him? When he leaves for Washington DC to campaign for Obama and against Mitt Romney it seems that he isn't.

It's Darby's first heartbreak but, as with so many of us, the lessons she learns from this experience are not necessarily useful in helping her navigate future relationships. Including ones with her recently divorced boss Bradley Field (the superbly named Scoot McNairy) and Magnus Lund (Nick Thune), whose thick patterned sweater and vaguely hipsterish beard give him the air of the kind of stock dullard who fashions himself after woodsmen and Scandi-noir detectives.

Of course, Magnus proves to be anything but that and his and Darby's relationship is one of the longer lasting ones in Love Life. Lund's a chef, quite an angry chef, who sends Darby flowers, makes her nice food, and cares for her. She wants kids (two or three, enough to fit in a car) but Magnus ups the ante and suggests a brood of six. Enough for a much larger car and one he'd like to drive them all to the south in to start a new life.

Their differences eventually prove insoluble and we get to witness what we already know, that the most passionate relationships often end in the most horrible and upsetting ways. While the relationships with Magnus Lund, Augie, and, later, the polite but cheeky Londoner Grant (Kingsley Ben-Adir) are played out with a sense of equality, some of Darby's earlier relationships come undone because of clear power imbalances.

 

A young Darby living in a large tasteful house full of art and wine bottles is spending money she doesn't have on clothes to impress her older lover but the age gap, her insecurity and her inexperience do for her and, on the other side of that coin, her brief fling with Danny Two Phones (Gus Halper) seems doomed to failure from the off as the spiteful nickname suggests. Not just because Danny called Darby 'my little Thumbelina' or because he's so intense but also because he's still obsessed with an ex-girlfriend he broke up with three years ago.

A cruel lesson is learned when Darby dumps Danny. Her ego is finally boosted. We see how it was first damaged in flashback scenes of a Thanksgiving break at boarding school where a fifteen year old Darby (played by Courtney Grosbeck) has her teenage heart broken by the theatrical Luke Ducharme (Griffin Gluck) who thinks it's 'sick' that she's from California, the home of The O.C.

Young Luke and Darby make out to John Mayer, and they perform together in a production of Cats but when he cheats on her with her unbearably solipsistic room mate she lies to her friends she has cancer to win their sympathy and when the truth comes out she travels home alone and shamed and Luke goes back to Corpus Christi only to reappear in her life many years later (this time played by John Gallagher Jr) for a brief fling and a night out to see Hamilton.

Luke makes Darby feel listened to, Bradley makes her feel a high flyer (but also that she's somehow inadequate), and Danny makes her feel superior while her relationships with Augie, Magnus, and Grant play out, as mentioned earlier, more like those between equal partners. Yet planted in the foundation of each of these romances is the seed of its destruction. 

Or is it? You'll have to watch Love Life to find out if Darby does find happiness and love in the end but it's no spoiler to tell you it is, as it is for most of us, a long and sometimes arduous - but also fun and exciting - journey she takes in trying to get there. Despite the occasional inaccurate observation, and what seems like product placement for Fjallraven Kanken, Love Life creates a map of the terrain of the human heart that looks remarkably similar to the ones we all carry inside of us.

It's painful to see people talk themselves out of happiness because of their own insecurities and the series perfectly illustrates the sense of anxiety we all feel when we're unsure of a person's intentions, whether or not they're going to kiss us, whether or not they're going to leave us, and whether or not that expression on their face means they're preparing to say hello or goodbye.

We see how difficult relationships with parents (Darby is fully aware she turns into the most obnoxious fourteen year old version of herself whenever she spends extended time with her mother) inform the way we handle our own adult relationships and we see how friendships become strained when we grow older and our lives take divergent paths. The storyline regarding a friend who resolutely refuses to mend their ways and improve their behaviour is one that resonated only too clearly for me. 

With a superb soundtrack that included The Fall's C.R.E.E.P., Arthur Russell's This Is How We Walk On The Moon, The National's This Is The Last Time, Caribou's Can't Do Without You, Justice Vs Simian's We Are Your Friends, TV On The Radio's I Was A Lover, and Fetty Wap's 679 it felt, at times, as if this drama could have been played out in my own, or one of my friend's, front rooms but it felt like that too because, despite the glamorous locations and Kendrick's Hollywood presence, it always seemed very real. These people were believable, their situations were believable, and their actions were, ultimately, believable. I believed in it, invested in, and eventually I was rewarded for that. Which, in some ways, is what we all want. Both from a television programme and a relationship.