There’s a scene in the trailer for the new Netflix series Love in which a guy (Gus, played by Paul Rust) rides shotgun in the car of a girl he just met (Mickey, played by Gillian Jacobs). Inspired by her freewheeling attitude and his own bitterness toward an ex-girlfriend, Gus disgustedly flings romantic comedy Blu-rays out the window.
“We just keep believing in this fucking lie that a relationship evolves and gets better,” he yelps as Mickey eggs him on. “Where do these lies come from? Fucking movies! Pretty Woman? Fuck you! Sweet Home Alabama? Lies! When Harry Met Sally? Fucking lies!”
It’s not the subtlest moment, but it pretty well sets the scene for the show, which bills itself as a rejoinder to the kind of pat, formulaic love stories depicted by the rom-com genre’s worst offenders.
In its 10-episode first season (a second is already in production), available on Netflix today, Love follows Gus, a nerdy tutor and aspiring screenwriter, and Mickey, a wild-child radio-show producer with a complicated relationship to substances, in their journey from total strangers to tentative romantic partners. But that arc is just a prelude to the show’s real undertaking: a darkly humorous look at a long-term relationship through all its peaks and troughs, with none of the typical Hollywood gloss.
Gus and Mickey seem at first like archetypes, but Love dives deep into their complex, often ugly psyches, to reveal them as far messier creatures than we might have imagined. When they come together, things get messier still, and the show’s narrative sometimes has a way of rambling. But since Love is really about process—about the stuttering momentum and miscommunications and uncertainty of a relationship—that untidiness ultimately works to bolster a sense of realism. And when the show begins slowly to peel back the layers of Mickey’s convoluted relationship to addiction, the commitment to realism really pays off.
Appropriately, the series comes from Judd Apatow, by now the industry’s go-to guy for projects that find the funny in romantic malaise. But the idea actually originated with the husband-wife team of Rust and writer Lesley Arfin (You know her from her long-ago “Dear Diary” column in Vice and her stint as a writer on Girls.) It reflects, Arfin tells me by phone, the questions she began asking herself as she and Rust settled in for the long haul. We chatted about her experience collaborating with her partner, the show’s unusual depiction of drug use, and why it’s important to see women behaving badly on-screen. That conversation, below.
Tell me about how this show happened.
Well, Paul is my husband, but he was my boyfriend at the time. He’s an actor and a writer, and I’m a writer, and his manager suggested that we write something together. I was like, “Ugh! Never! Worst idea!”
I had been writing a Web series that I was going to do with HBO called 34 and Pregnant, because I was 34 and I wasn’t pregnant and I wanted to be. So while I was working on this thing, I was like, I’ve never seen a movie that was about a relationship, but not a meet-cute and then a montage and then a happy ending. What happens when the honeymoon is over? What does a relationship looks like when you’re sitting on the couch in your sweats, eating ice cream, getting into fights, not having sex that much? I love Paul, but we’re not in our honeymoon phase. I was like: How do people stay in relationships? What does it look like? It’s this thing that everybody wants so badly, and at the end of the day we’re sitting on our couch eating ice cream and not having sex. What’s the big deal?
How long had you guys been together at that point?
Like three or four years. We both knew we wanted to marry each other. I had never felt that way about anybody. I’d been out with a lot of people.
Then I Googled the word love to see if it had ever been the title of a movie or a TV show. It hadn’t [at the time]. I talked to Paul about it. He was working with Judd at the time on Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. I’d known Judd from Girls. Judd said, “I love that idea, but I love it as a TV show if we start from the beginning and go through slowly from start to finish.”
I think Judd saw something in Paul and me as a couple. He and Paul are a lot alike. His wife, Leslie [Mann], and I are a lot alike. Paul’s the nerdy guy, and I’m the wild chick. But it’s not like I’m the Courtney Love and Paul’s the innocent Kurt Cobain. Paul has issues, too, and I’m a good person, too! We’re this odd couple that isn’t really that odd, that’s kind of every couple.
Was there any moment when you were thinking maybe this wasn’t a good idea?
Oh, my God, of course! Of course we fight. I don’t know if we were ever, like, maybe this is a bad idea, because it doesn’t affect us to that point. Nothing is more important to me than family and marriage. If the show were interfering with that, I would step away from the show first. It’s a TV show. Paul’s my husband. There are other TV shows.
He’s one of my favorite writing partners. But when we’re at work, when we’re in the same workspace, we bicker. There’s ego involved. He’s like, “Oh, Lesley, I don’t know about that idea,” and I’m like, “Stop feeling threatened!” It’s never about the work: We haven’t figured it out yet. There are other times when I think, What would I do if I didn’t have him at work? We really have each other’s back.
Has Judd offered any words of wisdom about collaborating with a spouse?
Totally. I was like, “Judd, how did you deal with watching Leslie and Paul Rudd have sex scenes?” He was like, “I think it’s the funniest thing. I love it; I think it’s hysterical.” Judd is very drama-free, so if there’s ever anything I’m freaking out about, he’s really helpful; he’s like, “It’s going to be fine; so much changes in editing.” I feel very safe with him.
**You Instagrammed a quote recently from Maureen Dowd’s female filmmaker piece about Bachelorette director Leslye Headland: “She wants to make films in which women behave badly and are not held at a higher moral standard or seen as ‘less than.’” It that also your mission?**Yeah, as a writer and as a viewer. I’m interested in seeing women who make mistakes and, like, don’t learn a lesson from it. Or they make mistakes and the consequences aren’t that bad. Or maybe they make them again. Maybe there’s a way to have a female character who is both good and bad, and who isn’t a mom or a vixen or a baby.
I always think about Walter White and how he became the person he was meant to be, which was not a good person. Maybe he never was a good person. Maybe he was so afraid of being a bad person that when he was finally given permission by death, he was allowed the freedom to be himself. I really identify with that. I’m not selling meth. I’m not killing anybody; that’s not Mickey’s agenda. That’s not Gus’s agenda, but there’s something that Mickey does: She knows the difference between right and wrong, and sometimes she’ll make the wrong choice on purpose. Maybe the consequences for her aren’t so black and white. Maybe that’s the truth with Gus. I’m so sick of seeing the nerdy white boy as the hero to the crazy girl. I lived in that fantasy for so long, the Cinderella complex. I think Gus probably has that fantasy, too. I think he really loves the idea of being needed, being able to fix somebody. There’s a lot of anger behind that. I’d be less shocked if he sold meth.
There’s something I really get about fucking ruining your life on purpose.
Have you ever done that?
On purpose? Yes. Subconsciously? Yes. And accidentally? Yes.
I’ve had to make the same mistake eight times in a row before I realize: This isn’t going to work. There’s no moral lesson. It’s more of a behavioral thing, how to get along with the world, be at peace with myself and my decisions. But morally? I don’t know what that means. I’m not killing anybody and I’m not selling drugs. Anymore.
The relationship to drugs in the show is interesting. We see the characters doing lots of them, but it’s never quite clear to what extent they are a problem. I don’t think that drugs are the problem. Alcoholism, addiction, those are diseases. Some people have that disease, some people don’t. You know what I love? I love in the movie Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis smokes a joint and she’s the hero. Smoking a joint doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you’re going to end up shooting heroin tomorrow. It’s important for me to show that. I’ve only ever seen: Drugs equals bad.
Although in Mickey’s case, she’s at least somewhat convinced that drugs are bad for her. Right? And maybe for her they are. I think part of her journey is that drugs, booze, dude stuff—all that wasn’t helping her be happy at this moment. Maybe that’ll last. Maybe it won’t. But I also think she’s the person she is because of everything she’s done. She needed to experiment and figure out how to do things the wrong way before she knows what the right thing is for her.
Can you think of other characters like that, ones you related to? I’ve always been inspired by Winona Ryder’s character, Veronica, in Heathers. There’s something very twisted, dark, wrong, and perfect about her. She shoots her fucking boyfriend at the end of the movie! I also loved Roseanne, how she never really apologized for who she was, and there were all sorts of problems going on in that family.
Carrie Bradshaw, too! What a great character. Somebody who just wanted to be in love so badly and was so obsessed with this guy who treated her like shit. But I get it! The whole series she suffered from it, but she wanted to suffer. I get the drama of wanting. I think that’s something about Mickey that I really relate to. It’s a part of me, too. We’re dramatic people. It doesn’t make you the most likable person. I don’t know if Carrie Bradshaw was the most likable person in the world, but people loved her because they related to her. She really was a female antihero.
This interview has been condensed and edited.