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Uncoupled Season 1 Review

Uncoupled is a romantic comedy series that premiered its first season on Netflix in 2022. It’s a solid, but flawed first outing.

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“Other people’s happiness is very tiring“

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It follows a newly single gay New Yorker who must navigate dating life after 17 years and he finds it hard to accommodate to that lifestyle and to the changed climate of gay dating. Darren Star of Sex and the City fame created and wrote this series, which will be obvious to anybody who has seen that famous show from the onset. The style of writing, characterization and comedy is very much in line with that show for better and for worse.

Neil Patrick Harris is excellent in the main role and finally he got to play a person who is most similar to his real life self. He is particularly strong at playing the more nervous aspects of Michael and he excelled at those. However, my issue is the character himself. I found Michael immensely frustrating and pretty much the male version of Carrie. He’s narcissistic, entitled and whiny, which thankfully others point to him at times, but not nearly enough.

His now ex boyfriend Colin is still a mystery to viewers as he’s talked about a lot, but we do not get to see his side all too much and that made for an overly one-sided approach at storytelling. Tisha Campbell is Suzanne, a sassy black friend of Michael’s. She’s actually great and quite amusing throughout. Marcia Gay Harden as Claire is also fun, though more on the clichéd side of things.

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The highlights are Michael’s male friends – Billy and Stanley. The former is a walking gay stereotype who is a player constantly on the lookout for sex and nothing else. The fact that he realized that toward the end of the season and is probably starting to change was wonderful and important to portray in a show like this. As for Stanley, he is by far the funniest character of the bunch. His lines of dialogue are consistently hilarious in their biting and observant nature and he is also another realistic, very well written character.

Most of this first season revolves around Michael’s failed attempts to find a new relationship and his troubles to adjust to this lifestyle, to the modern world of dating and whether or not he even wants to begin a new relationship. He also obsesses over his ex in a grounded, but still annoying manner as most of the season hinges too much on that issue.

When it comes to the depiction of dating, it’s grounded in reality, but Darren Star can’t help himself but portray each new partner having some sex-related issue. This was a staple of his previous show and it’s a common thread here as well. The generational gap is the best explored theme in Uncoupled, but the rest were only okay. The humor can be quite strong, but I wanted much more of it and the same goes for romance, which is thoroughly lacking, at least until this point. There are too many plot points and situations that are clichéd and predictable, but there are a couple that were genuinely interesting as well, so it’s very much a mixed bag.

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