BUMP AND GRIND

‘Laid’: Everyone This Woman Had Sex With Is Dying

The new Peacock show “Laid,” starring Stephanie Hsu and Zosia Mamet, has some plotting fumbles, but its surreal humor wins out.

When you’ve been single for a while but are still looking for The One, memories of past relationships can feel like a torment. This feeling is even more compounded if you’re still actively dating but unable to catch a spark no matter how well you hit it off at first. An odd feeling starts to worm its way to the surface: Am I the problem? Of course, these feelings are rarely true, everyone is on different life paths, yadda yadda yadda. In Peacock’s new comedy series Laid, premiering Dec. 19, Stephanie Hsu plays just this type of person in just this type of situation—but when her former lovers start turning up dead one by one, she discovers that she is very much the problem.

Ruby (Hsu) is a professional events planner who wants a little more from her dating life than casual bar hangs and lackluster sex. She craves the type of romance you can seemingly only find in movies, where Billy Crystal realizes (to paraphrase) he wants to spend the rest of his life with Meg Ryan, and wants the rest of his life to start as soon as possible. Sure, life is rarely so cinematic, but maybe… one day? Her plans to find someone to sweep her off her feet are derailed, however, when she and her Amanda Knox-obsessed best friend AJ (Zosia Mamet) find out that everyone Ruby has ever had sex with is dying, and they rush to warn the next victims and figure out an escape before this curse gets to the people Ruby actually likes.

The show is based on the Australian series of the same name from 2011, though the American version of Laid takes a more therapy-minded, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, you-are-the-problem approach. It’s a funny way to go about exploring this concept, and it mostly works. Ruby sees a therapist who regularly tells her she needs to stop being so self-absorbed, but if you found out that your sex was literally deadly, wouldn’t you be thinking about it all the time? It’s clear that the show wants to have its cake and eat it too, sneaking real-world relationship advice into an absurdist metaphor, but people are dying!

Laid mainly works as a comedic showcase for the talents of Stephanie Hsu, who is more than due for a leading role after taking the multiverse by storm in Everything Everywhere All at Once. She capably plays a character you can sympathize with while also kind of hating, and her incredulous style of reactive comedy is perfectly suited for the surrealism of a story such as this, where every suspicion her character has about herself is not only confirmed, but it turns out it’s way worse than she ever anticipated. Beau Is Afraid for girls, in other words.

It’s in the plotting that things start to slip, but only a little. Halfway though the season, it becomes clear that we’re in for a soft love-triangle type of situation, which in general tends to bore me, and especially feels halfhearted here. One of the guys she’s into is sweet and romantic, and the other is kind of mean to her the whole time. Obviously this is the sort of thing that tends to get fleshed out as a show goes on, but as of now I’m checking my watch any time these three are on-screen together. (And, not that half-hour sitcoms need to look like Spielberg movies, but it was funny to watch a whole season of a TV show thinking that it looks like a car commercial, only for a lengthy scene in a later episode to be set at a car dealership.)

Still, there’s more to like than dislike about Laid, which, it should be mentioned, might even set some kind of record this year for comedy cameos—John Early plays himself in one episode, as Ruby’s most famous former lover, which should be enough to convince even the skeptics that Laid is well worth watching. Mixing the realities of death with the surrealities of modern humor is tricky, but Laid is blessed with the kind of cast that finds something to laugh at even when it comes to our deepest, darkest fears.

Emma Stefansky

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