Love, Victor - Season 1

“Love, Victor centers characters of color, but never quite digs into what that means.”

Title: Love, Victor
Episodes Reviewed: Season 1
Creators: Isaac Aptaker 👨🏼🇺🇸, Elizabeth Berger 👩🏼🇺🇸, and Brian Tanen 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈 based on the novel by Becky Albertalli 👩🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Isaac Aptaker 👨🏼🇺🇸 (10 eps), Elizabeth Berger 👩🏼🇺🇸 (10 eps), Becky Albertalli 👩🏼🇺🇸 (10 eps), Danny Fernandez 👨🏽🇺🇸 (10 eps), Jess Pineda 👩🏽🇺🇸 (10 eps), Jeremy Roth (10 eps), and various

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 4.25/5

Hulu’s Love, Victor rises above the scrum of streaming options, fueled by high production values, easy-to-consume brevity, and earnestness that combats these tumultuous times with healthy optimism. Following its predecessor in more ways than one, Love, Victor echoes Love, Simon (2018) through its coming out narrative, a reprised backdrop of Creekwood High School, and the same carousel of teen revelations and pop music that elevates the viewing experience to a summer bop.

Thanks to a soap-like structure and teeming cast, Love, Victor holds very few surprises for anyone who regularly imbibes in YA romance. The tropes come aplenty, in particular the appalling lack of communication all around that drives the show’s myriad conflicts. But when co-creators Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger execute said tropes to a tee, and cast members competently engage viewers with fresh and candid performances, what’s not to like?

After all, this familiar backdrop gives the show’s hook the opportunity to shine: Rather than struggle to come out to a liberal, white, and upper middle class family, our new protagonist Victor (Michael Cimino) faces the tougher crowd of a religious Colombian-Puerto Rican household. While the show never quite roots despite such fertile ground, Love, Victor still feels additive overall to the growing library of queer content being made available to teens around the world.

Gender: 4.25/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Love, Victor centers a male protagonist who crushes on another guy, but the writing carefully renders its female characters as three-dimensional—a welcome change from Love, Simon, which flattened its women into plot devices.

Victor’s girlfriend Mia Brooks (Rachel Hilson) creates some of the season’s most gut wrenching moments as she becomes collateral damage to her mother’s mistakes and Victor’s confusion, without coming off like a punching bag thanks to her ample screen time and multiple storylines. Her relationship with best friend Lake (Bebe Wood) offers the sense that women in Love, Victor have lives outside their romantic interests in men—although I never quite believed Mia and Lake’s chemistry as best friends. Why would a grounded artist like Mia, whose popularity speaks for itself, seek the company of a fun but insecure social-climber like Lake? Maybe with more time to develop, Love, Victor can explore their friendship more in future seasons.

Outside of Mia and Lake, other women receive their own mini-dramas. I especially enjoyed the reconciliation story between Victor’s younger sister, Pilar (Isabella Ferreira) and their mother, Isabel (Ana Ortiz).

Love, Victor also rejects toxic masculinity in a strong throughline that appears consistently throughout the season. For one, Victor and his neighbor Felix (Anthony Turpel) become close male confidants over the course of the season in a way that feels more natural than Mia and Lake’s opposing personalities. When Victor finally gains the strength to come out to someone in person, he tells Felix first in a touching scene outside their shared apartment complex.

Writers also explicitly debunk the “nice guy” misconception, that just because someone isn’t a monster at their core it somehow excuses abusive behavior. When school jock and bully Andrew (Mason Gooding) tries to reassure Felix and Mia in two separate scenes during “Boys’ Trip” (Season 1, Episode 8) that he’s a nice guy despite the way he “messes with people,” Felix first hotly rebukes him while Mia responds matter-of-factly, “I think deep down, you’re a good guy. But I’m not sure that matters much, if on the surface you’re a total jerk.”

This rejection of machismo culture also surfaces during family scenes, peppered through Victor’s visible discomfort with the casual sexism of Victor’s father Armando (James Martinez) and immigrant grandparents. Given this recurring theme, plus the plethora of female characters and their interconnected relationships, Love, Victor fares pretty well on its portrayals of women—especially for a gay romance that centers men, a genre that doesn’t always have a great track record in this respect.

Race: 4.5/5

Aptaker and Berger visibly cast characters of color into main roles but never quite dig into what that means. Black characters like Mia, Andrew, or Mia’s father Harold (Mekhi Phifer), feel carefully stripped of racial specificity, helped in no way by their economic privilege and white social network seen through Mia’s white best friend and her father’s white girlfriend.

The Salazars see more nuance, but still leverage broad Latin American markers. Ortiz (who plays Victor’s mother) is right when she explains to Remezcla:

I don’t think we see [enough Latinx perspective.] I know so many young kids who were terrified of telling their parents they were gay because the culture of machismo is still so prevalent in our community.

That tackling of queer issues with a Latino lens is truly needed. But the shorthand employed on the show, through religiosity, conservative fathers, and occasional spoken Spanish, feels like we’re just scratching the surface. Beyond one explicit nod to Colombian heritage, nothing feels nearly as fleshed out as, say, the Cuban American details in sitcom One Day at a Time or Chicano authenticity of Vida or Gentefied. Forget ropa vieja casually simmering on the stove; the only culinary nod in Love, Victor arrives through Grandma’s esteemed tres leches cake, which is popular all over Latin America. Other meals feel like a missed opportunity: Victor’s conciliatory dish when trying to appease his fractured family is a bountiful plate of all-American pancakes, and in an stilted dinner scene, the Salazars pick at a joyless meal of what appears to be steamed peas and carrots.

Thankfully, the writers room includes Latino talent which helps reassure that the material comes from an informed place. And indeed, thoughtful casting reflects this. While some actors with Mexican heritage play Colombians, like Terri Hoyos and Juan Carlos Cantu as Victor’s grandparents or the youngest Salazar, Adrian, played by Mateo Fernandez, Victor’s father is cast authentically with Martinez, who is Colombian American. Meanwhile, audiences can glean the Puerto Rican half of the family through Victor, his sister Pilar, and their mother Isabel, all of whose actors have some Puerto Rican heritage.

LGBTQ: 4.5/5

Love, Victor does make some strides for gay visibility in the mainstream. And that goes a long way, especially when thinking about younger viewers who may lack access to queer communities in person, but who can still put on a Hulu series and see that they’re not alone in their uncertainty. However, some creative decisions simply tread water rather than make progress, so we’ll take a closer look at those here.

For starters, co-creators Aptaker and Berger are presumably straight. And even though co-showrunner Brian Tanen, who is gay, says that “the writers' room was filled with LGBTQ+ writers,” it’s clear that this drama is no She-Ra and the Princesses of Power or Sex Education—shows that overtly telegraph their LGBTQ youth cred.

This predominance of straight talent in positions of power persists onscreen, through the casting of romantic leads Victor and Benji with Cimino and George Sear, respectively. They do fantastic work, don’t get me wrong; but the pervasiveness of straight actors in gay roles alludes to more problematic underpinnings. Notably, the higher valuation of actors who conform to gender norms, even in queer media.

Shows that still fall into this trap range from another LGBTQ-friendly Hulu series, Runaways, with the same-sex attractions of Nico, Karolina, and Xavin, to HBO’s Gentleman Jack which centers the historical figure of Anne Lister who was known to be a butch lesbian. All these characters present as femme and are played by straight cis women.

Similarly, Love, Victor exhibits clear preferences for masculine-performing men in the roles of Victor and Benji. Meanwhile, less conformist characters get shunted into minor roles—a slight that can border on insulting, when it’s consistently queer actors being asked to provide the authenticity, but who aren’t given dialogue or character arcs in return. Bram (Keiynan Lonsdale), Justin (Tommy Dorfman), and Kim (River Gallo)—and the show’s life-giving cameo by drag star Katya Zamlodchikova—do bring that much needed credibility. But after clucking over their gayby Victor in the New York City-set "Boys' Trip" episode, and after dealing with his rude behavior but instantly forgiving him of course, none are to be found onscreen again.

Really, they’re just a repeat of Ethan (Clark Moore) from Love, Simon, a femme Black classmate who gets bullied way more than Simon ever does but who similarly swoops in to gay-guru the masc protagonist into self-acceptance. In both cases, straight-performing characters mine the emotional labor of more marginalized characters to achieve queer enlightenment. The dynamic feels pretty wrung out, as tiresome as seeing Black women or drag queens provide guidance to usually white protagonists, often as therapists or best friends in other TV shows and movies.

And finally, my last quibble. Terry Mesnard writes on Gayly Dreadful:

I was so excited to see how the show would tackle a character who didn’t know how to identify [...] But the back half has established that, nope, this is pretty much the same story that Simon found himself navigating.

When Victor ends the season with an “I’m gay!” declaration, with all the aplomb of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, I quietly grieved the possibility that the Hulu series might pursue a more modern coming out journey. While it’s perfectly understandable Victor might feel pressed to define himself, I’ve simply found other Gen Z narratives like The Half of It (2020) or Dickinson more invigorating, where sexuality is given the room to develop naturally and is seldom, if ever, slapped with a label. To end the season on such a binary “aha!” moment cements the fact that while Love, Victor does center gay characters, it remains unsatisfying for viewers looking for deeper LGBTQ content.

Mediaversity Grade: B+ 4.38/5

Love, Victor makes gentle inroads on queer representation, with its biggest asset the enormous platform of Hulu’s 32 million subscribers. Progress remains limited to gay cisgender protagonists, underlined by the decision to cast straight men in those roles. But there’s absolutely no reason not to down all 10 episodes at once and lose yourself in some candy-coated fluff. You deserve it.

Like Love, Victor? Try these other titles featuring queer Latino characters.

Grade: BLiJune 23, 2020Female/Nonbinary Creator