I'm back! I bet you're probably wondering why I'm doing things this way right? I wanted to get the movie reviews up here as fast as possible, so I could put up the Love, Simon review before I did the Love, Victor reviews. So let's get into season 1 of Love, Victor!
Two weeks ago I watched the 2018 teen romantic dramedy Love, Simon and reviewed it on Josh's Movie Review Corner. Last week I decided to watch the Hulu spin-off TV series Love, Victor. My original plan was to just watch two episodes a night since each episode is between 28 and 33 minutes in length. I did that on Monday night. Then on Tuesday night, I watched four episodes, and then on Wednesday I watched eight episodes. Each season is only ten episodes long so I'm actually finished season 2. See why I didn't watch very many movies in the last two weeks?
I knew of Love, Victor because here in Canada it's on Disney+ and both seasons dropped one episode per week during the time they were on. So whenever I'd go on to watch The Orville or a movie, I'd see it show up on the front page of the website. I hadn't watched it because I hadn't seen the movie yet. But after watching the movie and REALLY enjoying it, I decided to give the show a shot even though I was skeptical because I figured the show would be a rehash of the movie, but with different characters. It's not. In fact it's far from a rehash.
Season 1 of Love, Victor is anything but a rehash of Love, Simon. In fact in the first episode, Victor Salazar, played by Michael Cimino, reaches out to Simon, played by Nick Robinson, and tells him that he (Victor) isn't him (Simon). But not only is Victor not Simon, but Victor's friends aren't Nick, Leah, and Abby, his sister isn't Simon's sister, and his parents aren't Simon's parents. The character dynamics are different and storywise Victor's friends all have an equal amount of development and growth as the season goes on and each of them is interesting.
My favourite characters this season are Felix Westen, played by Anthony Turpel, and Lake Meriwether, played by Bebe Wood. Mia's great too, but there's just something about Lake in particular that draws me to her. And Felix feels like a familiar character because he's the best friend character that we see in every teen movie and show since the dawn of time. Lake on the other hand is different than the typical girl character that we get in these kinds of shows.
When we first meet Lake in the first episode, it looks like she's going to be the typical shallow, beautiful, cheerleader type character even though she's got curves, which I'm starting to see more of on shows like this rather than your typical Sophia Bush (who is also on Love, Victor)/Mischa Barton/Tiffani-Amber Thiessen type that were in teen dramas in the '90s and 2000s. But very quickly you realize that she's not that at all. Her character description on Wikipedia says, "Mia's social media-obsessed best friend". Except they don't really go into that past the first three episodes or so. She has issues with her mother, because of course she does. Beyond that though, Lake is very different and grows very quickly as a character. I think that might just be because of the fact that Love, Victor is ten episodes per season rather than 20 to 25 so it makes things alot tighter than past teen dramas. Especially when it comes to character development.
I love Victor's family. They aren't perfect and I like that they don't pretend to be like the Coopers on both The O.C. and Riverdale. My favourite character of Victor's family is his sister Pilar, played by Isabella Ferreira. She kind of reminds me of Kaitlin Cooper, Marissa's younger sister, on The O.C. (played by Shailene Woodley in seasons 1 and 2, and Willa Holland in seasons 3 and 4) but less manipulative than Kaitlin was in the later seasons of the show. Still a very cool character though and I love what season 2 had in store for her.
As for Victor himself, I've seen some reviews on YouTube and a few of them have said that while everyone around him was fully developed, Victor wasn't. I honestly didn't see that at all. I mean Victor's whole arc this season is him adjusting to his new school, making new friends, and figuring out whether or not he's gay, and if he is gay, whether he can make it work with Mia or not so he won't have to come out to his parents. I guess, we could've found out more about him, particularly about his past in Texas, but none of that is really all that necessary to understand what he's going through in this season.
Overall season 1 of Love, Victor was a solid season of television. I'm used to watching genre shows with high stakes and unnecessary drama that holds the story back in alot of cases. So this was a nice change of pace. There isn't really a character I hated throughout this entire season. Mason Gooding's character, Andrew comes close a few times, especially in the first few episodes, but he redeems himself as the season goes on. I guess there's Benji's boyfriend, Derek, but he's not in it enough for him to be really noteworthy. If you enjoyed Love, Simon I recommend you check out Love, Victor.
Alrighty, folks, we've come to the end of the ported over reviews from Josh's Movie Review Corner. So I will be back later with my review of season 2 of Love, Victor. See you all later.
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