We’ve Come to Bury Peacock’s ‘Laid,’ Not to Praise It

When it comes to romcoms, there are only so many stories to be told. Partners find each other, lose each other and find each other again. In the mid-2020s, they’re more likely than they would have been in earlier generations to add someone to make a throuple. Breakups happen when scandalous secrets are revealed; grand gestures lead to triumphant reunions. You can mix up pairings, settings and the subjects your cuties are bantering about, but ultimately, there just isn’t much we haven’t already seen before. With all this in mind, I do give Laid credit for an intriguing premise. Unfortunately, it’s been wasted on the wrong cast, the wrong tone and the wrong medium.

In Laid, which drops on Peacock Thursday, Stephanie Hsu plays Ruby, a party planner dating around Seattle and commiserating with her best friend and roommate AJ (Zosia Mamet) about the would-be partners who fail to meet her standards. Her new client Isaac (Tommy Martinez) seems to have stepped into Ruby’s life straight out of her romcom fantasies, but just as she’s in the middle of getting to know him, she gets a shocking text: a guy she slept with in college has suddenly died. Soon, more of Ruby’s exes start dropping dead, in the same order Ruby had sex with them. 

While true-crime fan AJ is immediately convinced that the deaths are connected, Ruby takes a little longer to come around. Soon, the two friends are working together not just to solve the case, but to let the community of people on Ruby’s sex timeline know they should settle their unfinished business. Creators Nahnatchka Khan (Fresh Off the Boat) and Sally Bradford McKenna (Will & Grace) adapted the show from the Australian series of the same name, which ran from 2011 to 2012.

So what we have here is the story of a woman’s dating life, and of the female friends diligently trying to unravel a mystery bedeviling it, written by two women from a format previously created by two other women (Marieke Hardy and Kirsty Fisher). But given all the female talent at the center of Laid, it feels counterintuitive that one of the elements that works best is… the guys? 

I said the show has the wrong cast and I will elaborate in a moment. But it’s the nature of the story that whenever we meet one of Ruby’s male exes, it’s as he portrays his character’s last moments of life, and the actors cast for these roles — including Simu Liu, Josh Segarra, and John Early — really make a meal of them. Selfishness is Ruby’s primary mode of existing in the world, so even if the exes don’t entirely believe in the seeming curse she’s trying to warn them about, it’s natural for them to spend their entire interaction with Ruby reading her for filth. 

Some dudes spend more than a scene with us, and are just as good as the ones who only got hired to make glorified cameos. Ryan Pinkston plays Brad, a frenemy who may work with Ruby in the party-planning business but definitely doesn’t respect her. Andre Hyland fully commits as Zack, who torments his girlfriend AJ by undermining her attempts to shore up Ruby’s self-esteem. The Office’s David Denman is appropriately disgusted as a detective annoyed by Ruby’s hysterical panic over the obsessed stalker she initially blames for killing all her exes. Ruby does also have female exes, but with one exception played by Barbie’s Alexandra Shipp, they are little more than vague sketches, even in this show by and about women.

Anyway: the actors we spend the most time with are the ones who were cast wrong. Hsu notches yet another role — after Everything Everywhere All at Once, Poker Face and Joy Ride — where her character’s rotted soul stands in ironic contrast to her sweet baby face. Mamet hasn’t convinced me in a TV role since she played caustic mob lawyer Annie in The Flight Attendant. AJ has some Annie-esque qualities, but AJ’s main character note is that she’s a girl’s girl for Ruby — if she has a job other than researching Ruby’s timeline, I don’t think we ever find out what it is — and Mamet’s dead eyes make her a poor choice for a millennial Judy Greer type. Michael Angarano’s Richie is a bar trivia host who uses Ruby’s announcement to blow up his life, relationship and look before volunteering to join Ruby on her visits to give her other exes the bad news. 

As the season goes on, it’s clear Ruby is supposed to be torn between him and Isaac, but it’s impossible to take her supposed quandary seriously when Ruby and Richie’s chemistry is so natural and improvisational, while every effort to give Isaac character quirks just makes Martinez seem more like a mannequin — pretty but blank.

The tone also feels wrong. Knowing the show is based on a property from the early aughts explains that somewhat: for a supposed comedy to confront a woman, sometimes several times in a single day, with the news that a former partner has died does feel like a relic of the edgelord era uneasily resurrected (as it were) in our era. The execution (again, as it were) of the premise gets a little less tacky as the season goes on: These are people who had sex with certified jerk Ruby, so there was probably something wrong with them too, such that we aren’t too offended when, for instance, Death comes for a couple in a malfunctioning sauna. 

But in the case of Brandon, the very first decedent, the cause of death is never specified. We do find out that even though Ruby barely remembered Brandon at all, she remained extremely important to him, so it does seem possible that he died by suicide motivated by his unrequited love for Ruby. Thus, when Brandon’s parents ask Ruby to ride with them to the wake, it’s pretty rough for Ruby to yell, “Shotgun! … Unless that’s the worst word to use today.” If it is, viewers kind of need to know?

But the show’s worst crime is against the medium of television, because this is a concept that should have been a movie. An inverted version of it already has been, in fact: Good Luck Chuck, in which the titular dentist (Dane Cook) is hexed to be the last guy women sleep with before they meet the partners they’re destined to be with. But Chuck is only the closest analogue. The ‘90s and aughts are crammed with high-concept supernatural romcoms about witches (Practical Magic), zombies (Warm Bodies), Frankenstein’s monsters (Edward Scissorhands) and ghosts (Ghost), to say nothing of time travel and body switching. When an idea like Laid’s plays out over 90 minutes rather than four hours — or more, because the season (infuriatingly!) ends on a cliffhanger — it’s a lot easier to roll with a character’s ethical shortcomings or irritating personality. We’re not stuck with them for an extended percentage of our own time on earth. 

Watch Zosia Mamet in the first season of The Flight Attendant. Watch Stephanie Hsu in Joy Ride. Watch Starstruck, a romcom correctly made for TV. Let Laid die a swift, unmourned death.