Week-to-Week: Love, Victor concludes its run with a small, amiable enough final season
The show ends as it began—limiting itself unnecessarily
When Love, Victor debuted, I wrote this essay for The A.V. Club entitled “Even before moving from Disney+ to Hulu, Love, Victor had little to add to queer television.” It was a title that reinforced the burden of representation I felt the show was carrying, where even if it hadn’t been moved from Disney to Hulu due to its “mature content,” it would have seemed tame and out-of-time releasing in 2020. However, my insistence the show had “little to add” got a lot of pushback from people who were essentially arguing that it was unfair to expect the show to break boundaries. Wasn’t it enough that there was a prominent, queer storyline being told in a mainstream setting? Wasn’t that, in itself, an addition that should be celebrated, as opposed to effectively being picked apart?
As I noted when writing about Fire Island and Our Flag Means Death two weeks ago, I’m a firm believer that we should be demanding more from mainstream queer media, and the years since Love, Victor premiered have only reinforced its outmoded storytelling approach. Although the webcomic that became Heartstopper only debuted a year after Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda, it reinforces how much the latter novel (the inspiration for Love, Simon, and thus Love, Victor) was not actually written in a contemporary context. Heartstopper explores the modern dynamics of queerness and coming out in a more comprehensive way that reflects where it sits with today’s teens, and whereas Oseman took the opportunity of adapting for television to expand Elle’s storyline and the show’s exploration of transness, Love, Victor—like Love, Simon before it—debuted in 2020 telling a story that might as well have been set in the year 2000, which was above all else a missed opportunity.
Essentially, Love, Victor failed the burden of representation because it had an entire TV season to expand on and complexify the storytelling of Love, Simon and just…didn’t, whether in terms of queerness or the dynamics of race and class the show introduced up front but lost interest in over time. And while the introduction of Rahim at least gave the show’s second season an additional window into queer experience, the show still struggled to develop dynamic stories around it before falling into a lazy love triangle, and the gesture to a same-sex relationship for Lake was welcome but also not really substantial enough to register in a meaningful way. Love, Victor was still content to be a teen show with a gay protagonist, as opposed to really investing in being a queer teen show—this isn’t a crime, as all types of queer representation are working toward the same goals, but it always felt like it could be something more than it was with just a small shift in inflection.
And while I went into the second season at least cautiously optimistic that Love, Victor could evolve into that show, I had no such hopes for the third season. This wasn’t because we have come full circle on the show’s distribution drama and the season debuted simultaneously on Hulu and Disney+—that decision is less about the content of the show and more about Disney abandoning their early position on limiting TV-MA content from the latter platform, and the need to focus on Disney+ subscriber churn. No, my lack of optimism in this case came simply from the fact that this was announced as the third and final season, meaning its priority was never going to be expanding the show’s queer worldview. It was always going to be about resolving the limited story arcs the show had already generated, which itself would be challenging with a shortened eight episode order.
There are flashes of progress in the third season: Victor has some casual sex with a boy his mother sets him up with, for instance, and once Rahim stops pouting about Victor choosing Benji after their kiss at Mia’s father’s wedding he gets his own stories about being forced back into the closet for the sake of his visiting uncle and then a charming meet cute with a waiter. These stories converging offers the one moment in the season where it gestures to telling a story about queer community, as Rahim is mocked by some homophobes and struggles to brush it off as easily as Victor does. But the show struggles to generate a sense of forward momentum in the season’s storytelling that we know has to end up circling back to where the show started. Rahim’s story makes the case for a spinoff but gets no meaningful resolution, while the show brings Victor’s casual hookup back as an actual boyfriend literally just so that they can pretend there’s any tension when Victor inevitably realizes that he’s still in love with Benji, who broke up with him when his parents decide Victor is why he lost his sobriety.
None of the tension the season creates for any relationship registers: I laughed when the show pretended that it was putting Felix and Lake back together after contriving breakups with Pilar and Lucy, as this show just doesn’t have the heart to tell that story. Even spread across three seasons, Love, Victor still needs to have the narrative arc of Love, Simon, with a full circle moment at the Winter Carnival where Victor and Benji get their ferris wheel reunion, and every other character is conspicuously coupled up in exactly the relationship they were supposed to be in. This got absurd when they threw together Victor’s hookup buddy and the closeted gay kid Victor aggressively tried to mentor in a rushed throwback to his mentorship from Simon, and contributes to a season that feels weightless. There’s no school-wide functions until the “Bravery” award that Victor gets that means he has to give a big speech. There’s precisely one storyline about school (the one that introduces the closeted kid). All that matters is the personal lives of these characters.
It’s not a terrible resolution of those characters’ stories, but it all feels incomplete. We finally get the Benji flashback episode we should have gotten back in the second season to make Benji seem like an actual person, but it eats up a lot of time without really showing us anything we didn’t already know. I found myself kind of drifting away while watching—case in point, I literally don’t remember if Lake came out to her mother on screen or not, as the show was rushing to cram that story into the time available. Andrew becomes solely defined by his relationship with Mia, while Felix’s storyline with his mother gets one b-story but is otherwise just kind of tossed aside.
Perhaps my simplest reaction to the ending was that it made the show feel tremendously small. Victor’s only been at the school for a year, and that year allegedly changes all of these people’s lives, but the third season struggles to get at that by narrowing so closely on these relationships. High school shows often get to come full circle at graduation, as the move forward to college puts things into perspective. But Love, Victor jumps to an earlier finish line without a lot to show for it, rushing situations like Mia’s move to Palo Alto and tossing in Andrew’s basketball storyline without having tried to do anything with it in the rest of the season. And while the show gets a big speech out of Victor, the writers were just never interested in anything on that scale: this season is so localized in the characters that the gesture to the big picture falls flat, reminding us how much the show abdicated its responsibility to those questions in the choices they made early on.
Stray observations
One clear sacrifice of a shorter season is Victor’s family situation - with both his parents onboard, there’s less tension, and an entire story about his father lashing out at his homophobic boss happens offscreen and is magically resolved by the two of them starting their own company. A far cry from the class issues the show started with and abandoned swiftly.
A pity that Natasha Rothwell couldn’t come back as the one teacher carried over from the movie, but I’m guessing scheduling and budget were a real problem here.
And no, it’s not a pity that Nick Robinson couldn’t come back, because continuing to define this show by Simon was weird, and the show was better off for drifting away from it. Still a bit weird he doesn’t come up.
The episode where Victor and Benji accidentally catfish each other on Grindr should have felt subversive but it really didn’t?
Okay, but seriously, I would like to see a Love, Rahim spin-off that follows him to college, so they could actually build a queer show around him? Because the reality was that any show built around Victor and Benji was going to be incredibly dull, and that one would at least have a chance.
Shoutout to my Mother for watching the entire three seasons in two days, as she hadn’t realized when the first two seasons were added to Disney+ outside of the U.S. Did anyone else just start the show with its arrival on the service that maybe you’re logging into more these days, or where it was featured more prominently?
Related: given that I watched season 3 on Disney+, and the second season on Hulu, and the FIRST season using screeners…I would love to know what kind of list I’m on at the respective services for my insanity.
Did you happen to watch the filmed version of Trevor: The Musical that premiered on Disney+ this week?
You really nailed all my feelings about LV. I was already quite cool on it, but watching S3 after Heartstopper was like eating a fine Swiss gruyere and then having Disney slap a stack of Kraft singles on the table and walk away.
I don't know if Benji was just bad casting or bad writing (probably both), but I never cared one iota about his relationship with Victor. Certainly by the end I was actively opposing them being together, merely out of spite. I was frustrated when I thought the Felix/Lake/Pilar/Lucy storyline was going to be treated well and then--they all just broke up for no good reason. Also at one point I realized most of the characters are just loaded, like filthy rich. Andrew, Benji, Mia, Lake, the new hookup guy from this season. Definitely seemd like a betrayal of the original intent to focus on a less wealthy family.
Fully support a Love Rahim college spinoff though. They won't do it but kudos to Anthony Keyvan for turning lemons into lemonade.