Just riffing on the title I used about Love, Simon
I started out watching Love, Victor with the internal thought (and occasional external acknowledgement) that I was settling down to watch a light and fluffy gay teen drama. I'm not calling it that any more, because it is more than that, and I'm really enjoying it. And I'm doing so in a way that doesn't engage my inner cynic - which is always nice.
Does it have some problems? Sure. It can be a bit heavy-handed sometimes with its moral-of-the-day approach, and I really feel like a lot of the issues it tackles could be worked into the show a lot more smoothly. There's also the pretty-young-people problem, where absolutely everyone in the show is almost too attractive. I'm all for a hot cast of MC's, but when the parents are always surprisingly youthful and attractive, and you're walking through the hallways of the high school and you don't see a single fat or pimply student - that's a little odd. What dark purging of unattractive people happened in this town to cause that?
BUT ANYWAY. Tread ye lightly from here - SPOILERS INCOMING.
I thought the show really set itself up well from the beginning. Don't get me wrong, I LOVED Love, Simon, and particularly the part about all his problems with coming out being internal ones. (Relatable! For my basic, middle-class ass anyway. As I talk about here.) But there's something about Victor's situation - conservative family, *relative* poverty and destabilised home-life - that immediately sets us up for good drama, and they do deliver on that a lot.
In Season 1, we have the interaction with the grandfather, the not having money for for the basketball thing and the parent's eventual split. In season 2, we have the mothers struggle between her religion and her love, the non-issue of telling the little brother that Victor's gay, and Victor's feelings about his father seeing someone else. (That last one could have been handled slightly better, but anyway.)
So following his arc is great - there's lots of conflict, and some really good feelings when we resolved them. But it's not just Victor - we also get a lot from the other characters. Felix struggles with his mom's metal health problems and early adultification, Mia's got abandonment issues and a distant father, Lake's mother seems to be pushing her in unhealthy directions sometimes - stuff like that. Andrew's great - a weird subversion of the "Jock is the bad guy" trope that knocks it out of the park for me. I really love the characters in that show, and I'm interested to see how we move forward with Rahim.
There's certain bits of dialog that I'd try to make more subtle, or issues that they want to represent that I'd try to build up to a bit better (rather than just dropping them in when they need plot to move forward) but none of that's been bad enough to make me want to stop watching. If anyone from Hulu or that particular team is reading this - I am available for script editing. 😉
Season 2 left us on a cliff-hanger - multiple ones, actually. Mia's headed towards her mom, Lake's on the cusp of a relationship with a girl (At least, I really hope she is) and, finally, we have to figure out if Victor chooses Benji or Rahim. So that'll be interesting. I'm kind of Team Rahim, to be honest - there's a whole bunch of issues around the masc/fem gay thing that I won't get into - but for me the primary issue is that Rahim seems fun and nice, while Benji's an asshole who needs to work his life out before he starts wrecking Victor's.
BUT I'll wrap this up before I start actually talking about the characters like they're real people that I know. (If I haven't already started doing that.) My main point is that it's a great show, with a lot more nuance than the movie that spawned it, and I'm really enjoying it.
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