It brings me no pleasure to report how much of my headspace is devoted to Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s PR-heavy second go at a relationship.
And who am I to call it a relationship? Maybe they’re just testing the waters again after a traumatic time, seeking comfort in the comfortable. Maybe they’re just fucking. Maybe it’s all a stunt. The fact that I could write a damn Harvard thesis on all three hypotheses makes me hate myself.
But there is a vibe they are projecting, one that makes me laugh. Especially now, and especially after all this [gesticulates wildly with his arms as if he is summoning a tornado and/or landing an airplane at JFK], it’s fun escapism to relive the Bennifer of 20 years ago. It’s the future nostalgia Dua Lipa was singing about back when we were all dancing on our dining chairs working from home.
We talked a lot about escapism during the pandemic. Specifically in pop culture. Yes, binges of “comfort TV” like Friends or The Office spiked. Schitt’s Creek won every award available. Ted Lasso took the few that it didn’t. But culturally there seemed to be a desire for another kind of comfort, one that this Bennifer fuckery is providing: Celebrities who are famous as hell performing their aspirational sex lives for us.
Would you like to go through an extremely public breakup and then bang Ben Affleck?
Were you spiraling during a pandemic to the point of basically becoming a Dunkin Donuts spokesperson, and then Jennifer Lopez literally texts, “hey, u up?”
I don’t know a more iconic form of escapism than to pretend this is how your life would work out. But I am a TV critic and I do know a show that gives you familiar vibes. Friends, watch Starstruck on HBO Max.
This series is the perfect companion to what appears to be Horny Celeb Summer. (Did you see that Angelina Jolie recently visited her ex Jonny Lee Miller?) That is because this is a series about a horny celeb.
What makes Starstruck work so well is that it doesn’t attempt to reinvent the format, but also kind of does exactly that. It’s a romantic-comedy series (the British kind, so a blissfully bingeable six episodes running less than 30 minutes each), and it owns that. But it is also, as apparently every recently single A-list movie star is, about sex. Are you envious of Bennifer? Watch vicariously through Starstruck.
I don’t remember the last time I thought a rom-com was this good. And maybe the reason why is because it is almost exactly Notting Hill. But actually relatable.
Drunk on New Year’s Eve, Jessie (Rose Matafeo) sleeps with Tom (Nikesh Patel). When she wakes up she realizes he’s a mega-famous movie star. He realizes he really likes this magnetic mess of a human.
You can basically fill in the plot from that introduction. But there’s still something so satisfying about the series.
It doesn’t portray the relationship as fantasy. What if you were just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her? That’s the kind of shit we get whisked away for. Starstruck meets you where you are: An emotional disaster, a professional flop, an OK body, but determined to work it out anyway.
Neither Tom nor Jessie understands why they click so well. But the connection is so undeniable that fate keeps causing them to meet. (Fate, feel free to send Nikesh Patel my way.)
There’s a distinctly older Gen Z/younger millennial vibe to the series, owed to Matafeo being the creator and writer. Her constant anxiety about turning 28 and feeling old aged me about a decade. But hers is also a very particular and relatable balancing act, one that I haven’t seen on TV before. She knows what she deserves and wants, both in a relationship and with sex. But she’s also formed from a dialogue with rom-com ideas about what love should be, and that haunts her.
There are no easy answers. That’s part of the fun. But most of the fun is just that: how fun it is. Jessie is one of those protagonists whose messiness is probably a little heightened for TV, but in the pursuit of acing the relatability test. You immediately understand why one of the most famous people in the world would be beguiled by her. By being herself, she’s beguiling.
If the narrative is familiar, why it stands out—especially in this #HotVaxSummer—is that they have sex. Immediately. It’s a curious thing about rom-coms. For all the escapism and fantasy, the sex part of a relationship and an attraction is just skipped over, or assumed.
Starstruck asks, what if Notting Hill was dirty? What if rom-coms actually acknowledged the sex? What if the characters talked about when one went down on the other instead of being demure in bedsheets?
The fun thing about being obsessed with the J.Lo and Ben Affleck journey is that it’s so not my journey. But maybe this is? Maybe Nikesh Patel (who, after also starring in Hulu’s Four Weddings and a Funeral reboot, is demanding to be the next Hugh Grant) is going to see me very drunk at a bar and find me irresistible.
The thing I like about this idea of #HotVaxSummer and the world opening again is not just the idea of possibility, but the validation of it. I’m a jaded, depressed, deeply broken cynic who would never abide by that kind of optimism. But the glimmer of hope is there. May we all be Starstruck.
