Love Life: Season 1

Kendrick's talents as a fierce, often biting, performer - who can channel powerful emotions into specific gestures and phrases - are wasted on Darby, who's painted purely in broad strokes.

Love Life is borderline appalling in its familiarity... And yet, somehow, some way, Love Life avoids being a genre-reliant retread or wimpy conglomeration of plot points from better movies or shows

Love Life is a piece of content that makes for amiable company and that doesn't stand out as particularly grievous; as part of a library graded on capacity rather than curation, it fits right in.

The semi-remarkable thing is how frequently Kendrick holds the show together. She's funny even when the scripts aren't, because Kendrick is a master of slightly askew line-readings.

Love Life fails to live up to either of those expectations, offering rote observations about interpersonal relationships and shallow characterization.

Series creator Sam Boyd takes us into a world in which love is at once tentative, earnest, intoxicating and doomed, where the music department goes with synths for sex and soulful tearjerkers for break-ups. The target audience should dig it.

Even Kendrick's considerable talent and skill can't make up for the show's overall flimsiness.

Just when a viewer thinks the show is mainly frosting with little to no cake, Love Life steers into far more substantial and surprising territory... Say what you must about Kendrick's trademark cutesiness, it's her acting chops that really pay off here.