Stephanie Hsu shines in the cool, contemporary rom-com Laid

“My vagina is killing people,” Ruby Yao (Stephanie Hsu) laments while standing over the grave of a previous lover. Of the 20 or so partners she’s been involved with in her lifetime, six are already gone. The remaining soon start to meet their maker in absurd ways (and in chronological order). Laid uses this mystical contrivance to understand why Ruby is an expert avoider of intimacy and honesty. If this sounds serious, don’t worry because Peacock’s show has the right amount of whimsy too. Laid is a cool, contemporary rom-com that works primarily because of its lighthearted tone and multidimensional heroine.

Ruby dreams of a Meg Ryan/Billy Crystal-movie type of splashy romance, the casual effect of being a ’90s kid. But it’s hard to find that when she’s basically Fleabag 2.0: She bails easily, refuses to open up to almost anyone, and has a complicated family dynamic. Despite these troubles, the scripts smartly peel back layers to reveal a vulnerable, candid woman with no choice but to deal with the fallout of her actions. After her breakout work in Everything Everywhere All At Once (she was robbed of that Oscar!) and Joy Ride, Hsu conquers the screen yet again. She’s a force of nature here as she pulls down Ruby’s walls to win everyone over in eight half-hour episodes. 

Laid co-showrunners Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna are determined to keep Ruby in check and allow her to grow, with Hsu matching the complex, wide-ranging emotions beat by beat. Ruby realizes something is very, very wrong when her college boyfriend dies, a past hookup collides with a car in front of her, and her almost fiancé gets an incurable disease. Ruby and her best friend, true-crime aficionado AJ (Zosia Mamet, sadly stuck in The Flight Attendant mold), take the next logical step: Make a kickass murder board/sex timeline to connect the dots and solve this whodunit.

Ruby and AJ then go around warning those still alive of their impending doom with no real insight into why sleeping with Ruby has turned into a fatal curse. (“This is not a Nathan Fielder show,” Ruby has to clarify to an ex at one point.) Their quests result in several fun cameos, with Josh Segarra, Mamadou Athie, Alexandra Shipp, Brandon Perea, Finneas O’Connell, and Simu Liu playing her frustrated exes. However, no one steals the show (or will make viewers laugh more) with a four-minute appearance quite like John Early playing himself, regretting the one time he decided to sleep with a woman.