Anna Kendrick’s Love Life Is the 2020 Version of Sex and the City
When HBO Max launches today, your first instinct might be to head straight for the Friends reruns now available on the streaming platform. Understandable, but consider taking a detour to watch Anna Kendrick’s charming original series, Love Life, first.
“Our love lives can quite easily be reduced to data,” says the show’s narrator, Oscar nominee Lesley Manville, in the first 30 seconds. “For instance, 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. Yet behind all those numbers there is always a much bigger story.”
The “much bigger story” in this instance is that of Darby Carter (Kendrick), a 20-something navigating the hellscape that is the New York City dating scene. Each episode centers around a different relationship in Darby’s life: the one-night stand gone awry, a promising romance that ends too soon…even her overbearing mother gets a chapter of the story.
And while the premise isn’t totally new—we’ll get to that—Love Life manages to stay fresh by feeling timeless. It’s about universal truths, those moments you see on screen and think, Wait, that happened to me—how did they know? If that sounds like Sex and the City, another series about dating in New York City that feels timeless, well, exactly. Kendrick herself pointed out the similarities between the two when I visited Love Life’s set in late 2019. “It has a kind of Sex and the City feeling,” she says. “There’s a new guy every episode, and you wonder what disasters await this character.”
There was a rule on Sex and the City that nothing could be written that didn’t literally happen to someone in the writers room or to someone they knew firsthand. While Love Life didn’t go that far, Kendrick says she pitched so many personal stories to creator Sam Boyd that she worried she might have burned some bridges. The writers eventually rearranged the stories enough to give her “plausible deniability,” she says, but there were times she’d see a line in the script and ask, “Did I tell you about this?”
“It would be exactly, like almost verbatim, a conversation I’ve had with someone,” she says. “They’d be like, ’No, we never talked about that.’ It’s amazing how universal some of these experiences are.”
One storyline that did make it in: Kendrick, who is also an executive producer on the series, says she pushed to include a “d-bag” character. “I felt like, in my experience, women don’t make it out of their 20s without dating one guy who’s a little scary,” she says. “The degree to which he’s scary varies for everybody, and I didn’t want turn it into an after-school special, but I do think that’s something worth exploring.” I’ll refrain from spoiling how that manifests for Darby but…yeah, Kendrick is spot-on.
And Kendrick wasn’t the only one on set whose dating experiences made it onto screen. “Every time I make a comment about a line that makes me laugh, someone is like, ‘Oh, that’s because that exact thing happened to me,’” she says. Using a Paperless Post invitation to figure out where an ex will be on Saturday night, for example. “It’s so specific but so real.”
Of course, this wouldn’t be a good rom-com series without a best friend with her own messy love story to tell. Zoë Chao is a revelation as Sara, keeping the character from falling into the wacky BFF trope by giving her necessary depth. If Darby is a Carrie with Charlotte tendencies, Sara is a Samantha all the way.
“She’s really funny and spontaneous and wild,” says Chao. “But also destructive and depressed and sad and confused. We get to explore all of those chapters.” One of the most heartbreaking episodes of the season is devoted to Sara and Darby’s relationship—boyfriends come and go, but seeing two friends wonder if they’ve outgrown each other cuts deep. “I really like Sara because I understand her a lot through her love of Darby,” Chao adds. “This friendship is very real, and it’s nice to see a female friendship where oftentimes they’re taking care of each other in a really nurturing way.”
That’s ultimately what the show is going for, Kendrick says—that realness, the feeling of recognition. “That’s the best thing, isn’t it?” she says. “Whether it’s a nonfiction book or a movie or anything, it’s recognition that you’ve had an experience and somebody else is talking about it. It just makes you feel less alone.”
Anna Moeslein is a senior editor at Glamour. Follow her on Instagram @annamoeslein.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
