Season 3 of Love, Victor will debut on Hulu and Disney+ on June 15, 2022.
In the queer canon, Love, Victor and the movie it spun off from, Love, Simon, are tricky beasts to contend with. On one hand, both found ways to be groundbreaking and genuinely affecting. On the other, their simplicity holds them back from not just breaking ground but transcending it. With Love, Simon, that was an easier pill to swallow. Here was a funny, thoughtful, and imperfect high school coming-out story made for the masses, as opposed to the majority of queer cinema, which, with a few exceptions, is typically relegated to the art houses.
Love, Victor, however, came to TV, a medium that had shown its comfort with queerness pretty routinely since the turn of the century – at least in comparison to the big screen. Its first season, in which Victor (Michael Cimino) remained in the closet, felt like a gay show of a different era. But then its second found success in showing what it looks like to be out and proud in the context of a more conservative, albeit modern, Latino family. It’s surprising (and frustrating), then, that this third and final batch of episodes keeps getting distracted from the queerness that helped make it feel special in the first place.
There are shows with queer characters and then there are shows about queerness. Love, Victor’s first two seasons fell firmly in the latter. Even with its subplots, Victor was still at the center. But this important distinction gets lost right off the bat in Season 3. Its busy premiere jumps from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, resolving them and establishing a familiar status quo. Victor’s choice between competing love interests Benji (George Sear) and Rahim (Anthony Keyvan) carries the same weight as, for example, Mia (Rachel Hilson) figuring out her living situation as her father prepares to move for his career.
Those storylines wouldn’t be overwhelming on their own, but they also compete with Felix (Anthony Turpel) and Victor’s sister Pilar (Isabella Ferreira) trying to keep their relationship a secret, Lake (Bebe Wood) exploring her sexuality, both Benji and Rahim dealing with their individual families, and Victor’s parents (cast MVPs James Martinez and Ana Ortiz) navigating getting back together. Love, Victor is no longer a show about a gay high schooler and his specific experience as such. It’s an ensemble piece, and while that itself isn’t inherently a bad thing, it just hasn’t quite earned it.
Even in its best moments, few would point to the writing or performances here as to why the show succeeded in the past. Its stilted dialogue and nauseating tendency to have teens say the perfect, most therapized things to each other are back and more pronounced than ever. With just eight episodes, the series’ final season keeps the characters largely separated, only bringing them together for astounding moments of maturity delivered by various 17-year-olds. Too few of these characters feel like they have distinct individual voices, instead acting as sounding boards for the writers to give them advice in their own voices, no matter who the messenger ultimately is.
The show is still best when it focuses on Victor and his family. Their dynamic has shifted over the years thanks to Victor’s coming out, but watching them settle into a place where love comes first is genuinely rewarding. One of Season 3’s strongest threads sees Victor’s parents awkwardly trying to set him up with another gay kid from their church. Love, Victor can seem a little scared of conflict, but watching Victor try to figure where he fits into hookup culture is one of the few ways this season pushes the envelope. To keep the series’ dialogue with its younger target audience intact, the writers skirt away from anything past PG-13, but there’s still value in how this storyline explores this specific and undeniably prominent aspect of the gay community.
But again, this thread is forced to share time with the standard cliches of a high school soap. For every step forward, Season 3 takes two steps back. Spreading the characters so thin largely rips away any final-season energy Love, Victor might’ve conjured. The ending is easy and predictable, to the point where you can feel the writers just trying to get it over with. Unlike past seasons, it’s just not clear what audience these final eight episodes are for. Fans of teen soaps have juicier options, while the LGBTQ+ community just got a more genuine and overall better representation in Netflix’s irresistible Heartstopper. And so, Love, Victor drifts off quietly, as if hoping not to be noticed. Sadly, that approach is the opposite of pride.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/hfbvBj9
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