So I was about as shocked as Victor, the show’s chirpy, newly out high-school protagonist, when he notices a squishy plastic cylinder lying on top of his more experienced boyfriend’s wallet when they go off to a cabin for the weekend.
In its framing, the show’s depiction of Victor’s coming out pushed against Love, Simon’s “Aw, wouldn’t it be nice to have Jennifer Garner as a supportive mom?” story line, giving him a more complicated relationship with his parents, and considering differences of race and class — but lightly, and in soft focus.
Last year, the creators told me that was a “collective decision,” because they wanted “to do a show where 16-year-olds were behaving like 16-year-olds do,” which wasn’t the right fit for Disney’s kid–and–Baby Yoda–focused platform, though Disney+ was reportedly not happy about all the things that made Love, Victor’s first season interesting: “alcohol use, marital issues, and sexual exploration.” Even if the creators insisted that the first season was what they wanted to make, when it came out on Hulu, you could still sense how the show was written for a Disney+ audience, which is to say, one younger and less familiar with gay worlds.
Also, characters use Grindr, though not by name — it’s referred to as “one of those apps, you know which one” and it makes that one notification sound that will trigger a Pavlovian response if you do indeed know which one.
His relationship with his boyfriend Benji gets into shaky territory when he worries that he isn’t gay enough for Benji’s friends, and because Benji doesn’t get why Victor keeps trying to appease his mother, who refuses to acknowledge much about her son’s sexuality, or his boyfriend.
That mess is what’s at the heart of this season’s main conflict, between Victor and his mother Isabel, played with quiet grace by Ana Ortiz, and it’s here that Love, Victor finds its best material.
There’s a lot of believable tension there — Victor and Benji have a history, Victor and Rahim can relate to each other better about their families — though things can end up feeling schematic.
Love, Victor is a pathbreaking YA show in its choice of main character, but it still exhibits an urge to fit in with its peers, especially some of the lighter teen-drama fare you might find on basic cable.
That’s a worthwhile niche — the kids should have an approachable way to learn about coming out — but the more compelling parts of the season arise when it gets less didactic, and when Victor isn’t just a cipher through which to depict A Gay Teen, but kind of a mess of a person.
It’s a show that seems to be in conversation with itself about the best way to tell its own story, how gay to be, how much to risk alienating a wider audience, and how much to appease them, just as its lead character is making those same calculations.