TV Review: Love, Victor
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I didn’t know that what I would appreciate during these troubling times was the life and times of 16 year old high school students, but Love, Victor feels like a nice salve. A show set in the world and location of Love, Simon, we follow not Simon Spier, but Victor Salazar, a young man moving to Atlanta with his family from Texas for a fresh start. The fresh start becomes more complicated as he befriends and dates Mia, while dealing with his growing feelings towards Benji, his gay classmate and coworker. Throw in some crazy family drama and you’ve got a recipe for a delight of this new television season.
Told in half hour increments, Love, Victor is really something interesting. The amount of ground the show covers in the character’s stories is amazing. These writers do have an incredible amount of understanding of the amount of drama and mess they can put into a half hour episode run time. It’s truly a skill to be able to balance this many characters and storylines in this time limit and do it well. There were so many times I had to pause an episode to scream because there was so much happening in one moment. But it’s not just about high dramatics, although that fifth episode is an all-timer in terms of awkward tension and stress. Love, Victor really succeeds in that it’s always focused on the characters and their emotional states. I love that the show is constantly reexamining character relationships and letting the characters find and seek their own growth.
Victor is one of the more compelling protagonists I’ve seen in a show aimed at a younger audience. Michael Cimino is just brilliant at showing the character’s full range of emotion and struggle. Victor absorbs a lot from the people around him and I was definitely triggered watching the show as Victor attempts to the perfect person to everyone. Cimino allows you to see how the weight of that pressure has shaped Victor and how he moves with and against it. Quite a deft turn from a young actor.
Most importantly the show gives Victor the dignity of his journey. With Simon’s voice over to help, the show does a really great job of letting Victor discover his sexuality. He gets to question things, try dating a girl, exploring what his life means in a non-judgemental way. He isn’t demonized for dating a girl just as he’s not required to be some kind of perfect gay. He just gets to be, warts and all. Love, Victor is going to be such an important show for that reason, allowing kids to see, without judgement, that life can be messy but your choices are valid.
For all of the show’s many many positives, there are a few areas that I felt could have been much stronger as I do think there’s some sort of reckoning we’re heading towards with these shows. Love, Victor is very sharp about this particular type of coming out journey. It gives Victor all the room he needs to explore whether or not he’s into guys in a healthy, yet dramatically interesting way. But it also positions this as a juxtaposition to Simon’s story in it’s opening voiceover by giving him more obstacles that he will have to overcome. To me it rang like an oppression olympics mindset. As someone who has read the book, seen Love, Simon, and seen this show, I couldn’t tell whether being blackmailed and outed was more difficult than standing up to religious parents and figuring out how to break up with a girl.
I think this is because for a show about a character keeping up appearances, it doesn’t delve as deep into murkier waters outside of Victor’s immediate problems. Some spoilers for the show are below, so read at your own caution.
I waited the entire season for a religious reckoning with this family. In their scenes in Texas the family is shown going to church, they move to Atlanta and his mom is mentioning where they should put a cross, and then it’s like Christ is a see through curtain. Yes, his grandparents bring it up when they arrive, but only because there’s two gay men in the house. How does Love, Victor go an entire season with a main character questioning his sexuality, and not have him pray about it/wrestle with his belief in God? Once it is revealed that not only did his mom have an affair but the father beat up the man to the point they had to leave Texas and…they don’t pray about it? Or go to a church? Or get counciling from a pator or priest? Did they stop going to church altogether? The show held on to so many stereotypes of Texas and to some extent Georgia and never circled back to their religious beliefs in a significant way. There might only be 30 minutes in an episode, but this is a big missed opportunity.
It was also disappointing that the show felt it necessary to rely on the cliches of the gay experience. Yes, New York has a huge gay community and is seen by many as a mecca for gays, but Atlanta has a huge gay community and just like the movie, they accted as if it didn’t exist. It makes 100% sense that Victor would want to run and see Simon in NYC and even have a revelatory experience with Simon and Blue’s roommates, but was there no closer resource Simon could have pointed him to? I think one area I’d like to see growth in is finding ways to tap into the existing area and community.
Speaking of cliches, the most egregious of Love, Victor’s faults, lies in two relationships. They don’t sink the show because there’s enough sterling acting and character work, but this reviewer would be remise to not address them. Love, Victor owes a debt to the many teen shows that have come before it and it might just be because I am scarred by Teen Wolf, but the second Felix stepped on the screen, I felt like I was watching history repeating. Another white best friend to a Latino main character with a wide smile, a good head of hair, and super awkward traits? That’s big Stiles energy, complete with a crush on the popular girl who is out of his league. Love, Victor imagines a world where Stiles and Lydia got together with its relationship with Lake and Felix. The nerdy guy and popular girl trope is so worn out at this point that the second it was even hinted at I rolled my eyes. Both Felix and Lake have a lot of insecurities and things they need to overcome on a personal level, but what I thought their storyline truly failed to address is that these characters’ sense of self should come from within. Felix, over the course of the series, does learn to stand up for himself, but it is often in direct response to things having to do with Lake. Lake makes a big statement in the finale, but I’m so tired of the popular girl needing to have a man validate her and hold her up. You won’t hear me give Jeff Davis many compliments, but at least he was smart enough Lydia’s self worth come from within and not have it be because of Stiles or Jackson.
And finally, Benji and his boyfriend are like the teenage version of Richie and Brady from HBO’s Looking. I think the show does a disservice to the growing attraction between Benji and Victor by placing a boyfriend in his path that the audience will not like. It’s one thing to have to have a boo that’s inconsiderate, but to have Derek act so inconsiderate in the face of an anniversary surprise, not to mention going off on a Brady like scree about heteronormative things, is going a step too far. It’s a shame because there’s something really fascinating about seeing Benji and Victor navigate around each other in respectful ways.
Love, Victor then is an incredibly compelling and nicely messy first season of a television show. There’s so much for the show to explore in coming seasons and with character’s this rich, it will surely be a fun time.
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