Stephanie Hsu’s Surreal Rom-Com Laid Is the Perfect Holiday Binge
The morning after a nice date that ended in bad sex, the heroine of Peacock’s new comedy Laid takes stock of her love life. “Here I am, after 20 years of dating,” Ruby (Stephanie Hsu) laments to her best friend and roommate, AJ (Zosia Mamet). “Thirty-three years old, on the phone with a Lyft driver at 2 a.m. trying to figure out if I’m standing on the northeast corner.” That’s when AJ’s live-in boyfriend Zack (Andre Hyland from Barry) interjects: “It might be time to look inward.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Zack, a trollish layabout, has no right to criticize other people’s life choices, but you know what they say about stopped clocks. Still, it’s going to take more than just the armchair psychoanalysis of a failed video game livestreamer to make Ruby engage in earnest introspection. First, a college boyfriend she barely remembers has to die. And that’s where this otherwise grounded comedy, premiering Dec. 19, gets surreal. One by one, men (and a few women) Ruby has slept with drop dead—far more than could conceivably be a coincidence. As she scrambles to figure out what’s happening, save the lives of her exes, and safely bed other people, the raunchy, hyper-culturally-literate Laid investigates why she can’t find lasting love.
For a show with such a quirky premise, Laid (whose theme song is, predictably, a female-fronted cover of James’ weird-sex anthem of the same name) feels surprisingly familiar. In tracking down old lovers to warn them of their likely demise, Ruby is on a journey similar to that of Dylan (Johnny Flynn), who has to inform his many past partners of his chlamydia diagnosis, in the British rom-com Lovesick. Zoe Lister-Jones’ 2023 comedy series Slip finds the creator-star awakening the day after each of several one-night stands in a new reality where she’s in a committed relationship with last night’s partner. Laid’s generationally specific mix of mystery and social satire recalls Search Party—and one of that show’s stars, John Early, appears here as well, playing himself as a narcissistic nightmare. (“Find me my Anatomy of a Fall!” he screams into his phone.) Russian Doll also deploys a distinctively millennial brand of surrealism in its exploration of characters trapped in self-destructive patterns.
This isn’t a knock on Laid, really. Creator Nahnatchka Khan (Fresh Off the Boat, Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23) doesn’t seem to be ripping off any of these predecessors so much as tapping into a sensibility that peaked a few years ago. Which is to say that the concept doesn’t feel quite as imaginative as it’s trying to be, or as it might’ve been in the late 2010s. Thankfully, the show compensates in sharp execution for what it lacks in originality. It may not be a revelation, but its eight-episode season is precisely the kind of fun, clever yet undemanding entertainment you could happily inhale as a distraction from, say, holiday travel or 2025 angst.
Hsu and Mamet make the perfect duo: a charming, if hapless, female Lothario and the loyal friend eager to use the skills she’s honed as a true-crime girlie to investigate the deaths that keep happening in what she calls Ruby’s “sex cluster.” (Of course AJ makes an elaborate “crazy wall” whiteboard with strings connecting past partners and Sharpie X-es tracking who’s died.) Khan, who famously cast James Van Der Beek as an abrasive version of himself in Apartment 23 before doing something similar with Early, speaks pop culture as a first language, and Laid has some of the funniest referential jokes this side of 30 Rock. Ruby and AJ banter about the meaning of “Ruth’s Chris,” as in the steakhouse chain, and take turns purposely butchering the name of Ryan Murphy’s absurdly titled Dahmer–Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. (Relatable!) They consider the possibility that Ruby is being filmed for a Nathan Fielder show.
Khan adds urgency and romance to the story by introducing a devastatingly handsome love interest, Isaac (Good Trouble alum Tommy Martinez), who might well be Ruby’s perfect man. An event planner by trade, she’s organizing a 40th anniversary party for his parents—which gives them plenty of reason to discuss their own ideal marriages and other topics, like their love of musical theater, on which they’re almost spookily aligned. Her enforced chastity isn’t the only thing keeping them apart; Isaac also has a maddeningly impressive girlfriend. But we get the idea, common to the romantic comedies that fuel Ruby’s fantasies (though Khan is savvy enough about the genre’s tropes to give us reason to believe it’s not so simple), that only through making sense of her past will Ruby finally be prepared to settle down with a soulmate.
In the end, the familiarity of Laid becomes more of an asset than its high concept. There’s something delightful about the balance the show strikes between repeating comfort-food clichés and subtly subverting them. A parade of funny guest stars—Kate Berlant! Simu Liu! Chloe Fineman! Mamoudou Athie!—doesn’t hurt, either. I’m not sure Laid needs the second season that the finale’s abrupt cliffhanger implies. What I do know is that, assuming it’s renewed, I’ll be watching anyway.