‘Laid’ Review: Stephanie Hsu and Zosia Mamet Liven up Peacock’s Uneven Sex-and-Death Comedy

At some point in the last decade-ish, the phrase “body count” shifted from referring to casualties in battle to the precise number of sexual partners one has had.

It’s one of those idioms that is kinda gross no matter how you think about it. Any time an expression goes from combat kills in Vietnam or genocide victims or losses in a school shooting to … how many people someone has slept with, it should give somebody rhetorical pause, especially given the frequency with which it’s used for so-called “slut-shaming.” But sometimes language is like that!

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The florid turn of phrase is pushed to its concrete extreme in Peacock‘s new dark comedy Laid, adapted by Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna from an Australian format that predated the widespread sex-based usage of “body count” but not the linguistic intersection between “getting laid” and “getting laid to rest.”

The resulting series has a lot of fun with its premise, boosted even further by the affectionate repartee between stars Stephanie Hsu and Zosia Mamet. But the more that central idea is treated as a thing to be understood in functional terms and not just as a colorful metaphor, the less interested I became. By the time the show reached its over-explained final episodes, I was more than ready for a tight, finite conclusion.

Instead, Laid sets itself up for possibly the least narratively necessary second season in recent years (or at least since The Day of the Jackal last month). I’d absolutely still watch it for Hsu and Mamet, but not because I’m as amused by the premise as I was eight episodes earlier.

Hsu stars as Ruby, a Seattle-based party planner becoming increasingly frustrated by her endless string of unfulfilling online dates. Everybody tells her that she’ll eventually meet the right person, but they also tell her that she’s self-absorbed and too hung up on things from her past.

Then, one of her exes dies — an ex so marginal to her past that she barely remembers him, even after she discovers he was still hung up on her over a decade after a breakup that she unceremoniously orchestrated.

Then another of her exes dies, this one right in front of her.

Soon, an undeniable pattern is developing: One by one, the men (and women) Ruby had sex with are dying. Not the guys she just hooked up with. Not the guys with whom she only engaged in hand stuff. Her body count is accumulating a body count.

The only person Ruby trusts enough to let in on her mystery is her roommate and bestie AJ (Zosia Mamet), an obligatory true crime obsessive (like Mamet’s character in The Flight Attendant, Ruby has a special interest in Zosia Mamet doppelgänger Amanda Knox) in a not-especially-romantic long-term relationship with unsuccessful video game streamer Zack (Andre Hyland). Additional assistance will eventually come from Richie (Michael Angarano), a bar trivia manager whose role in the story I won’t spoil. But since he’s a major part here, I’ll acknowledge him.

Soon, Ruby and whoever happens to be available are tracking down her various exes in order to try and prevent their apparently inevitable demises. Will Ruby be able to get answers, though, in time to sleep with her hunky new client Isaac (Tommy Martinez) — who may be everything she looks for in a man, which means she doesn’t especially want him to die?

I have not seen the Australian original series, but however much this Laid does or doesn’t resemble that Laid, it has enough similarities to other works that there are ample avenues for comparison. The methodical reconnection with a litany of past loves plot is a familiar one — I’m thinking of the series Lovesick and the movie Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, but there are lots of others. The repeating high concept premise has shades of Netflix’s Russian Doll or Apple TV+’s The Big Door Prize or Showtime’s The Curse, among other series. The long-form rom-com trappings made me think of recent series like Max’s Love Life and Netflix’s One Day. And once Death becomes an embodied force stalking specific targets and taking them out in ways that are frequently gory and outlandishly contrived, the Final Destination franchise comes into play.

It would normally be a hindrance to the romantic comedy structure that the men in Laid are, pretty much uniformly, dull. A lot of the hookups past are played by recognizable actors — movie and TV stars making one-episode cameos abound, and I won’t spoil any of them — and some of the circumstances behind the relationships and then their deaths are funny. As characters, however, they’re limited. Meanwhile, the actual main male characters are blandly conceived and performed. Angarano, Martinez and Hyland are collectively forgettable, with no real chemistry to be found among them.

I’ll accept willingly, though, that this heteronormative black hole is somewhat intentional (albeit in a way that absorbs more narrative time than it deserves). Laid is primarily love story about female friendship, and whatever sparks are lacking between Hsu and various male co-stars is easily made up for by the fully believable charm that comes from every scene of Ruby and AJ bantering together. Hsu infuses a lot of emotion into the tight comic dialogue, while Mamet remains an actress capable of elevating the most basic of punchlines. Put the two actresses together, and you have an onscreen bond that captures the secret language and rhythms of years of communication and caring.

It helps, at least from the perspective of this television critic, that this is a television show about characters who love television shows. The foundational language of their friendship is fueled by very specific and very clever references that almost never failed to make me smile. There are, for example, two different scenes wringing protracted punchlines out of Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story that felt like they could have been inserted into the text completely to pander to me. Mission accomplished.

For five or six episodes, Laid is primarily AJ and Ruby reacting to Ruby’s situation on a gut level, with lots of variations on, “Huh?!?” and “Wha?!?” and other kinds of escalating confusion. And although some fatigue sets in after a while, these responses seemed exactly correct.

But it’s one thing to make this metaphor concrete, and another to make it so concrete that characters have to deal with a dozen-plus deaths. The volume of morbidity becomes more of a problem the more you think about it, and the more you try to treat your characters as existing in the real world while also existing in a comedy. The show finds so much frivolousness in so many demises that when it finally gets to the first one that’s supposed to hit home emotionally for Ruby, I was no longer buying it.

There’s only so far I’m willing to accept “Ruby is selfish” as an explanation, yet for a long time, Laid wants each episode to give that same rudimentary diagnosis. It seems to suggest that what’s happening with her exes stems from the Groundhog Day school of elaborate karmic punishments — as if by learning to understand that other people are the stars of their own narratives and not just tertiary characters in her own, Ruby might be able to disentangle them.

But as she starts looking for more specific answers and causes, the symbolism began to disintegrate for me. It’s somehow disappointing when the show decides there’s a single answer, even if we’re not supposed to take it seriously. I found myself hoping it could be resolved in a simplistic fashion to avoid the diminishing returns of continuing to unravel something that is much more appealing raveled. Actually, I eventually decided, I don’t really want to know what’s going on after all.

I watched most of the season without resorting my increasingly familiar and perfunctory “Surely this should have been a movie” fallback complaint — until the cliffhanger of a finale, which left me fully convinced Laid was more of movie than a multi-season series. Again, Hsu and Mamet are so good I’d still watch more. But sometimes, limited series should just be limited series.