Love season two: Should Mickey and Gus make it?

WIKIPEDIA calls it a “romantic comedy” but despite its name, it’s a mistake to tag it as that. For one thing, the central couple probably shouldn’t even make it.

IF YOU caught any of Love’s first season, you’ll know that Gus (Paul Rust) and Mickey (Gillian Jacobs), the two characters at the centre of this hard-to-define Netflix series, aren’t a natural fit.

And maybe that’s why there’s something honest about these two very flawed people who probably shouldn’t even be together.

They spent the first season meeting each other and trying to make their fledgling romance work only for the mess of their own lives to overwhelm the combination of them. The second series just started streaming and they’re not having an easier time of it.

It may seem counterintuitive to call it Love, given the kind of tropes and storybook endings Hollywood usually feeds us about what relationships should look like. But co-creator Rust insists the title isn’t ironic. “It’s not the opposite of love and we’re being clever calling it that,” he says. “It’s a sincere title.”

Rust, who also plays Gus on the show, created the show with wife Lesley Arfin and uber-producer Judd Apatow.

Apatow says he originally had the idea of a TV series about a couple who the audience knows won’t make it in the end, around the first time he was making TV, back in the days of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. He was going to call it Trainwreck.

Separately, Rust and Arfin had their project cooking, inspired by their own relationship. The three of them then came together and Apatow says he then stole the name Trainwreck for his movie with Amy Schumer.

Jacobs on Mickey: “If she was my friend in real life, I would be very concerned but since she’s fictional, I just enjoy her flaws.”

But now, the fate of Mickey and Gus isn’t so clear.

“I always want people to be together,” Apatow says. “I’m a child of divorce so I always root for couples to figure it out but that doesn’t mean that’s what the conclusion will be because I feel like it’s fun to just see where they take us.

“This might be one of the first things where I don’t have my own idea of whether or not they would survive.”

Whether Mickey and Gus will, or should, make it is a contentious issue among the series’ fans. Even Jacobs jokingly says that while she’s also a child of divorce, she wants everyone to break up.

Apatow adds: “I think people’s opinion of it changes from episode to episode. There might be an episode where you think they have such great chemistry, if only they would stop doing this and get out of their own way, it would work great.

“And there are other times when you just want to say to one of them, ‘run for your life’. Also, I think that’s how we all feel early on in relationships. We try to figure out if this is a person I can commit to or should I run?”

Apatow says that TV as a medium, in the age of cable and streaming networks giving creators the freedom to work outside proscriptive labels like “comedy” and “drama”, is exactly why a show like Love can exist.

Mickey is a self-confessed “love addict”.

Apatow first made his name on TV working on the likes of The Larry Sanders Show for Garry Shandling and HBO before going on to produce the short-lived but critically acclaimed Freaks and Geeks which also launched the careers of James Franco, Jason Segal, Seth Rogen and Linda Cardellini.

After a string of movie hits including Knocked Up, Bridesmaids and Anchorman, Apatow returned to TV projects by teaming up with Lena Dunham on Girls in 2012.

“You can tell all sorts of stories with different kinds of endings on TV,” Apatow says. “When you make movies, there are only a few ways you can go. You have to resolve the story — the couple survives or they don’t, the cop solves the mystery or someone kills him — there are only so many ways to go.

“But with an ongoing series, every episode is a unique moment in their lives and you don’t necessarily have to have a happy ending or a sad ending. It might just illuminate a part of their journey.

“A lot of these episodes, you can’t do them as movies. You can’t make a movie about a couple who tries really hard not to have sex. The storytelling on TV can be a lot more adventurous because movies are so expensive and people want a rip-roaring ending.”

Love season two is streaming now on Netflix.

Continue the conversation on Twitter with @wenleima.

Wenlei Ma travelled to the US as a guest of Netflix.