In “Laid,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, Stephanie Hsu (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) plays Ruby, a self-centered woman of 33 who discovers that everyone she has ever had sex with is dead or dying, in the order she had sex with them. (I was about to write “slept with them,” but that is a euphemism the evidence doesn’t support.)
As seems to be the case in most every modern romantic comedy — this is, often, in a purposely self-conscious way — she has been serially dating with poor results, not helped by her own judgmental attitude. (To underscore a point, she’s a party planner, stage-managing other people’s celebrations.)
If TV shows, movies and social media are to be trusted, this subject is of great interest to persons under the age of, what — 40, 60, 80? Finding the right person, that charming prince or princess, is the stuff, too, of fairy tales, though in those, the protagonist doesn’t run a gantlet of one-night stands on the way to happily ever after, and there is a lot of riding around in forests rather than swiping whichever direction means you’re interested.
The realization that she may be some kind of deadly sexual Jonah/inadvertent serial killer happens eventually across the first couple episodes, beginning with the news that someone she’d known (and had sex with, two, wait, three times) has died. Having a dead “boyfriend” makes Ruby feel kind of special, and she decides to attend the funeral.
“I didn’t give him a chance,” she says to roommate AJ (Zosia Mamet). “He was a really good person.”
“You used to call him Farty Scorsese,” AJ reminds her, while AJ’s cheerful hippie slacker gamer boyfriend, Zack (Andre Hyland), suggests that the reason why none of Ruby’s “thousands” of dates have proved satisfactory might have something to do with Ruby herself. (You will have reached the same conclusion.)
At the funeral, she discovers that the deceased never got over her; and before the day is out, another old partner will die before her eyes. More deaths and news of deaths follow. Various theories as to why this is happening are raised and discarded. Ruby imagines she might have a stalker who out of jealousy has been killing her old boyfriends, girlfriends and half-remembered hookups, but as they’re caused by a mixture of natural causes and horrible accidents, the viewer never entertains this seriously; nor do the police, to whom Ruby applies for help, arriving at the station — or “police house” as she calls it — with a box she is certain contains a severed head.
AJ, however, is only too happy to take the mystery on: “I know every girl now is obsessed with murder, but I started the trend.” She creates a “sex timeline,” like a detective show murder board, with pictures and yarn and a list of her theories of the case, which include “the moon,” “Nathan Fielder” and “reverse Jane Wick.” “I love this for us!” she cries.
In fact, there is no natural explanation for any of it; the deaths are unrelated by anything but Ruby’s oft-mentioned vagina. Developed by Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna from a 2011 Australian series of the same name, it follows the original’s road map much of the way — though the former series, which streams on Prime Video and which I recommend, is more modest, compact and focused, with significantly different characters. The key to Ruby’s … condition is more or less the same, but where the Australian show sort of shrugs and moves on, the American is much more concerned with causes, motivations and psychology; it needs reasons for the reasons, which feels a little out of tune with the basic nuttiness of the premise. There can be such a thing as too much motivation.
Ruby is not the first rom-com heroine shaped by an obsession with rom-coms — “I want an epic kiss in the rain or a big speech about how someone loves every little flaw in me” — and besides the whole people dying thing, her main concern is Hallmark handsome Isaac (Tommy Martinez), who has hired her to organize his parents’ 40th anniversary. The very sight of him knocks her off her feet. They bond over movie musicals and romantic comedies — Isaac has a too-perfect girlfriend, who is not a fan — and the ideal of a long, loving marriage.
Although the script is organized to push them together, in practice Hsu has more chemistry with Richie (Michael Angarano), one of her brief affairs whom she remembers only as “bar trivia guy;” their mutual antagonism is, of course, the state in which many a movie romance begins, though whether “Laid” will get around to acknowledging this, or even cares to, is a question this inconclusive first season does not answer.
It can be read, at a very long stretch, as a metaphor for STDs, or a tract against casual sex, the perils of alcohol or, most convincingly, of sex while drunk. (“Maybe it’s like a time release thing,” Ruby suggests to a gynecologist, regarding the many years that pass between some of her encounters and their fatal effect, further suggesting, “I rode an elderly donkey when I went to the Grand Canyon — could that be related?”) But no overarching ideas hold up, not least because this curse is only specific to Ruby. For a time it seems that we may be watching a story, like “Groundhog Day” or “Russian Doll,” where the universe pranks a person into getting right with themselves and the world; and while her unfortunate situation will force Ruby to face her self-centered, self-destructive behaviors, mere enlightenment isn’t likely to turn the spigot off.
The premise, and what’s done with it, paint “Laid” into a moral and ontological corner, which it addresses temporarily by literally opening a door. (A second season is clearly intended.) But however frustrating the series can be — and some will not find it frustrating at all — Khan and Bradford write funny dialogue, and Hsu and Mamet are very, very funny delivering it. (Others are good too, especially Angarano and Hyland.) All episodes premiere at once for easy bingeing — and it is, indeed, easy to binge.
