“Love Fail” (Created by Julia Price Baron) is a charming little webseries that follows a young 20s female, Angie, as she ventures into the online dating pool. Braving her way through such gentlemen as “nice_guys_can_finish_last,” “mom4eva” and “beesknees,” Angie finds the comedy (and pain) of online dating. And maybe, just maybe, she finally finds the right guy.
Each episode has us watching Angie on a date with a new guy, from online dating. Contained in the same bar each time, we see the highlights of the night, which mainly consists of the funny and strange things these men do and say. Angie earnestly gives them a chance, but one by one, she reaches her breaking point, and the date ends. Poor Angie!
The webseries is a bit of a mixed bag, as each aspect of the series has a bit of good and bad in it. I liked it, but I didn’t necessarily need to keep watching it.
Angie is a fun character to root for. Laura Grey is very natural in the role, and brings a sweet, likable, and well-meaning feel to the character. On the flip side, her character is more reactive than proactive, as she spends each episode being tormented by her various dates. Each date on the show is fairly stereotypical. There’s the mama’s boy, the hippie, the suited jerk, and the mean insecure guy. Each offers up their own type of comedy, but the characters are flat and repetitive, really just there to service a line of jokes, begging the question of why she agreed to go on a date with them at all.
The format of the series keeps things quick and simple, but also really restricts the creativity of the premise. Each episode clocks in around 3 minutes, which makes it easy to down an episode or watch while taking a mental break from whatever you’re doing. But then the show gets a bit repetitive – this is definitely not a binge friendly show.
Each episode is essentially just the guys being weird and setting themselves up for joke after joke, but it also takes place in the same setting with the same style and feel. It seemed tough to keep things fresh, to build on the humor, the characters, and stories. There just wasn’t any variety to the overall idea of “you meet some weird people online dating.”
On the other hand, the jokes were pretty consistent (the guys making fun of themselves, and some of Angie’s reactions), though a bit easy to make, and the final joke always seemed to make me laugh. I like the new twist for the last episode, and was kind of hoping that would happen (I ain’t giving spoilers don’t even ask!).
I liked the writing. It was smooth, fun, easy, and had a stylish feel to it. That being said, I would have liked more from each story, and to feel the stories evolve from episode to episode. The direction was ok, not bad but didn’t really help things along. The production quality is pretty good for what I assume is a very low budget, and it doesn’t detract from the material.
In the end, it’s pleasant to watch, with a few laughs here and there, but fairly unmemorable once you go about your day to day. If you like what you see don’t let the show wear out its welcome by binge watching.
Written by: Ted Barnes
“Love Fail” can be seen on YouTube or on the official website.