Swipe Left: “Love” and the Unromantic Comedy

In the fourth episode of “Love,” a darkly funny, pleasantly shambling romantic-comedy series now streaming on Netflix, the male protagonist, Gus, played by the show’s co-creator Paul Rust, is hiding out in a bathroom at a party. He is talking on his cell phone with a friend, complaining that he seems to have driven away the other half of the show’s love match, a troubled and captivating young woman named Mickey, played by Gillian Jacobs, who is known for her roles on “Community” and “Girls.” “This happens all the time,” Gus says. “It’s like I meet somebody and they like me initially, and I just, like, fuck it up and they get tired of me or something.” As a diagnosis of his effect on other characters on the show, Gus’s analysis is spot on: he has a knack for ingratiating himself quickly, before his passive-aggressive neuroses spoil things. The opposite, however, is true of Rust’s own effect as a performer. When we first meet Gus, lying in bed with a girlfriend who will soon drive him away, he appears to be among the least likely leading men in comedy’s long history of unlikely leading men.