Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for “Laid.”
“I don’t know anything about love,” laments Stephanie Hsu’s character Ruby at the conclusion of Peacock’s new romantic comedy series “Laid.” The eight-episode season dropped in its entirety on December 19 and follows’s Hsu’s Ruby as she realizes everyone she’s ever slept with, including Michael Angarano, pro wrestler Ettore “Big E” Ewin and, inexplicably, John Early, are dying.
Ruby goes on a journey to find out why this is happening and, in the process, find herself amidst her past conquests, with the help of her best friend and roommate, AJ, played by Zosia Mamet, who puts her true crime obsessive skills to good work tracking down Ruby’s exes and figuring out a timeline: “I wanted to do something for the person I love most. And that’s you.”
It’s a grand gesture for the ages, right up there with running onto an airplane to stop your lover from flying to some far-off locale (as Ruby does in an attempt to prevent Early’s death by plane crash on his way to shoot an Icelandic yoghurt commercial) and getting Letters to Cleo to play on the top of your high school. Ruby even somehow finagles AJ’s ultimate true crime fixation, Amanda Knox, into meeting AJ for dinner.
“Your boyfriend said you always say, ‘If I could just have one hour with Amanda Knox…,” Knox herself says in the “Laid” finale. “Well, I’m Amanda Knox, and you have one hour.”
“We kept the set very small that night because we didn’t want any spoilers and wanted to respect Amanda’s privacy. It wasn’t dissimilar to the scene that we shot,” Mamet told IndieWire. “She’s wonderful and so kind and so smart and so open about her experience. She’s a force. She’s one of the strongest people I’ve ever met.”
Learning to be somewhat selfless, Ruby pretends it’s AJ’s forgettable, pathetic boyfriend Zach (Andre Hyland)—whom Ruby slept with and thus signed his death warrant in a decidedly selfish action — who organized this clandestine supper. But, despite AJ’s hurt, she knows right away that only a best friend would gesture that grandly. Thus, the love story at the center of “Laid” is not with someone who can help Ruby break her curse, but with AJ.
Mamet has made a career of gravitating towards depictions of female friendship, from her breakout in “Girls,” playing high-strung Shoshanna Shapiro, to Aya Cash’s estranged childhood best friend in “You’re the Worst,” to real-life bestie Kaley Cuoco’s on-screen bestie in “The Flight Attendant.”
“It was love at first sight,” Mamet said of her friendship with Cuoco. “The first time we met was my chemistry read with her for that show. We got really, really close while shooting. Shooting a TV show or movie can be a bit of an incubator for relationships because you spend such long hours and so many consecutive days together, so we had circumstances in our favor.
“And then we had the horse girl connection,” Mamet added, reminiscing about how she brought her horse out to stay at Cuoco’s ranch in California, where “The Flight Attendant” relocated to in its second season. Mamet and Cuoco would go riding together on breaks from shooting.
Now Mamet and Cuoco are network stablemates on their new shows, with Cuoco most recently starring in “Based on a True Story,” a true crime caper that “Laid”’s AJ would certainly be at home on. The two attended a Peacock Killer Women in Comedy event in November, along with Hsu, who acts as a producer on “Laid,” helping to bring a laid back vibe to the intense eight-week shoot.
Mamet sings Hsu’s praises, sharing that Hsu found ways to lighten the mood, including a Friday costume contest. “She was not only the face of the show but the beating heart of the entire thing,” Mamet said. “She really sets a beautiful, grateful tone on set and that starts everyone off on the right foot.”
This is in contrast to the souring of Ruby and AJ’s friendship throughout the show. Like all good comedy heroines (paging Carrie Bradshaw), Ruby is a hot mess whose behavior alienates AJ, her family and her colleagues at her party planning job. AJ grows sick of being taken advantage of for her savant-like investigative skills and flexible schedule as a bartender, and at one point kicks Ruby and Zach out of her apartment.
Mamet says that the nuanced portrayal of the struggles female friendship in your thirties can encompass is one of the things that drew her to “Laid.”
“When you’re in your twenties there’s not as much pressure on a friendship. [They] don’t really need a lot of tending,” Mamet said. “You’re just having a good time with one another.”
Or, in the case of “Girls,” just kind of existing in the same scene because that’s what the show called for, despite the unlikelihood of any of those titular girls being friends under different circumstances.
“As we get older and the world is placing pressure on our friendships from the outside, friends become people that you have to lean on more. Suddenly, you end up asking more of your friends and needing more from your friends. When people can’t give you that, it puts a friendship under an examination that doesn’t necessarily feel comfortable,” she continued.
“[Sometimes it’s] not necessarily that anyone’s at fault, but you just grow apart and you start to see that distance forming. It’s a really scary and sad thing that can just happen in life.”
That’s where we find Ruby and AJ in “Laid.” AJ has been giving her time and skills to helping Ruby but, as emerges as they track down Ruby’s exes, Ruby has a penchant for taking.
Though Ruby commits an affront against AJ that any friendship would struggle to come back from, Ruby’s aforementioned grand gesture goes a ways to repairing that, or at least showing AJ that their friendship is the most important thing to her and she’s willing to work not only on herself but on earning AJ’s trust back.
“I don’t think we often think about them like that,” Mamet said. “We think about romantic relationships like that, but not friendships.”
The real sex curse ended up being the friends we made along the way.
“Laid” is streaming on Peacock now.
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