LOVE

NETFLIX

Few shows contain such pure expressions of their title's antithesis as Judd Apatow 's LOVE. Clearly, Apatow is aware that he entertained us with his hopeful glimpse of potentially escaping banal mediocre suburban Uber-whiteness in his beloved show ''Freaks and Geeks.”

Rather than returning to that endearing vision of a relatable, human world, Apatow has, in the interim, grown so estranged from the feelings of humanity that he can no longer express them. Decades of Hollywood's vapid, meaningless excess have left him only able to approach human emotional states through the metaphor of drug highs, proving that, at least, he still shares some semblance of brain chemistry with humanity.

We cannot love these characters we cannot recognize as human, and as they cannot love one another for the same reason. They are trapped in the uncanny valley. They have alien, Los Angeles jobs. They struggle mightily with simple problems, they elicit but one emotion- pity. They remind me of the characters in the obscenely overrated film American Beauty: wallowing in their self-created problems, intentionally worsening them in order to feel anything at all.

LOVE is a show about what it means to be a machine masquerading as a human being. The machine wants this thing it has only heard about through toxic media and painful emo poetry slams at pretentious coffeehouses. It tries to emulate us and it cannot, for if it had a soul to sell, it was long ago brokered away for the chance to put the travails of the machine on Netflix.

FPJEROME