Whether you’ve been prolific in your love life, only had a few partners or somewhere in between, imagine if you find out that they’re dying one by one, in the order in which you slept with them. That’s the idea behind a new Peacock comedy starring Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu; it’s more romantic than our description implies.
Opening Shot: A shot of the inside of a bank. Then we see the back of a woman’s head as she tentatively goes up to the teller.
The Gist: Ruby (Stephanie Hsu), encouraged by her friend Richie (Michael Angarano), is there to tell the teller that he is about to die. Why? Because they had sex one time, and it seems like every previous partner of hers has died in one way or another. She whispers it all through the glass, but the teller can’t hear her, so she passes a note; of course, the teller thinks it’s a note announcing a robbery.
We flash back three months; Ruby is on a chemistry-filled third date with a guy named Jason (Finneas O’Connell), but when they sleep together, they both acknowledge that it was extremely awkward. He wants another chance, but she knows “that thing” that she’s looking for isn’t there.
When she gets back to her apartment, her roommate and friend AJ (Zosia Mamet) is disappointed it didn’t work out, but AJ’s boyfriend Zack (Andre Hyland), who is a gamer who rarely wears pants, thinks Ruby is setting her standards way too high.
She meets with a swoony client named Isaac (Tommy Martinez) who wants to plan a 40th anniversary party for his parents. As he describes their marriage, Ruby can’t help but tear up, and projects forward to knowing that, at 33, the earliest she can have a 40th anniversary is when she’s well into her seventies.
That’s when she gets a text from AJ that Brandon, a former college boyfriend, died. She barely remembers Brandon, telling AJ that she remembers his little farts with every thrust. But, feeling wistful, she takes AJ to his funeral. That’s where she learns that she was way more meaningful to him than he was to her — and that his current girlfriend looks a lot like her.
At the funeral, she runs into Jeffrey (Josh Segarra), Brandon’s best friend. They reconnect at first, but then we find out that she slept with Jeffrey right after breaking it off with Brandon. Not long after that, Jeffrey meets a grisly fate. After such a rough day, she and AJ get drunk on port, and she finds out another previous boyfriend has also recently died.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna co-created Laid, and it has the pacing and pop culture references we’ve come to know from some of Khan’s other shows, like Fresh Off The Boat and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment 23.
Our Take: If you want an interesting premise for a romantic comedy, you can’t get any more interesting than “a woman’s past lovers all croak.” In the case of Ruby, AJ figures out that they croak in the order in which Ruby has slept with them, which is why Ruby starts to systematically warn her former bed partners that they are probably doomed.
In the second episode, for instance, Ruby’s baseball-playing ex takes an “FB to the T” — a foul ball to the temple — and Robert (Mamoudou Athie), “the one that got away,” ends up announcing at his wedding that he is dying of cancer.
It’s a device that forces Ruby to reckon with her past, and it’s a fun one to play with. Almost immediately, in the case of Brandon, Ruby finds out that at times she treated her partners with more contempt than they deserved, or at the very least ended up dismissing them because of one quirk or another.
Of course, these types of reckonings are usually happening to men in comedies like these, so it’s fun to have a bit of role reversal here. And Hsu plays both sides of Ruby’s personality, that ready for any kind of fun type crossed with a real romantic softy, with ease. She is able to carry the scenario because she makes Ruby believable. She’s not some cartoonish person who’s had a lot of lovers; she’s a person who has had a number of partners over her teenage and adult life, wants something more, and seems to have to go through some hell before she can get what she wants.
As we mentioned above, Khan’s shows are always laden with up-to-the-second pop culture references, and we get those here. How well will the multiple mentions of Elsbeth, for instance, age if someone watches this show a couple of years from now? They are a big part of han’s style, though, and while they’re deployed liberally, she doesn’t hammer them over viewers’ heads.
Sex and Skin: Any sex we see is inferred.
Parting Shot: “If two is a coincidence, then what’s three?” Ruby asks AJ. “A pattern,” says Zack as he walks in the room.
Sleeper Star: While it may start getting to be old hat to see Zosia Mamet as the main character’s fast-talking, overthinking best friend on a show, she’s just so darn good at it. Oh, and we have a soft spot for the dog who plays Hot Sauce.
Most Pilot-y Line: A scene where Ruby sings “Graceland” while uncomfortably driving with Brandon’s parents and girlfriend between the funeral and the parents’ house is overly long, and not in a Family Guy-style “so long it becomes unfunny but then funny again” way.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Stephanie Hsu’s dynamic lead performance is the main attraction of Laid, but the quest to figure out why Ruby’s lovers are dying and what this all means to her romantic life will be a funny and interesting journey to take with her.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.