Starstruck Season 2 Sets New Standards for Rom-Com TV

This post contains Spoilers For the second season StarstruckYou can stream the entire episode on HBO Max. We highly recommend it.

The clubhouse leader in the most funny TV scene of 2022 doesn’t start off looking like it will be funny. This is what makes it work.

It’s the beginning of the fourth season finale. StarstruckThe charming British romantic comedy starring Rose Matafeo stars as Jessie. She is a wandering New Zealander who lives in London and stumbles into a relationship. Jessie can be seen looking in her bathroom mirror, as her phone alarm goes off. Jessie then switches to sitting on the bathroom toilet while she examines the result of her home pregnancy test. It’s not what she wants and she starts crying. Well, less “crying”There are more “full-throated, agonized sobbing and wailing.”In this moment, it is obvious that Jessie has been positive for HIV and is now struggling with her biggest stupid mistake in a life filled with many small stupid mistakes. Though Matafeo primarily does off-kilter comedy on this show — a later episode finds Jessie and Tom fighting because she doesn’t like him describing her as “kooky” — this is utterly raw and compelling dramatic acting from her, and suggests a serious, Fleabag-esque pivot for Starstruck.

Instead, the scene itself reverts to what the show is most famous for. Jessie gets up and tries to regain her composure. She then picks up the box with the pregnancy test results to verify that she has interpreted them correctly. Her expression changes from one that is filled with pain to one that is filled with confusion as her breathing slows down. She looks at the box. She examines the test. The box. The test. You go back and forth, occasionally letting out a pleasant surprise. “Oh!” until it becomes abundantly, hilariously obvious that — as she so often does — she got things entirely wrong, and is Not pregnant. She suddenly feels as though the entire trauma never happened. She calls out “Jordan!,”Jump shoots the test into a wastebasket and leaves the bathroom without a care in this world.

It is an absolutely brilliant comic sketch, twice subverting the audience’s expectations in service of that explosive payoff. It is something I wouldn’t show to anyone else in the context this season. Starstruck in general. It’s only funny because of this context and what it reveals about Jessie. It’s television. This is not an 80-second clip in the middle a three-hour-long movie. A one-act play is not allowed. It’s not a hotdog or a sandwich. Television. It’s possible to imagine it.

Let’s pull back a bit to take a wider view than the one offered by that bathroom mirror. Jessie and Tom spend the majority of their first season together, then they break up. Although there is an evident attraction between them, they are fundamentally mismatched at every other level. She is active, he is reserved. He is disciplined, but she is impulsive. Near the end of the episode, he resists his urge to have dressing on Caesar salad. He has to look good for film shooting the next day. She is frequently wrong with absolute conviction; he’s sensible but also wracked with self-doubt. On a practical level, she’s a nobody and he’s a celebrity. (At You can find more information at New Year’s Eve party in this season’s third episode, one of Tom’s movie friends quickly excuses himself from a conversation with Jessie once he realizes that she works at a Cinema rather than work In cinema.) There are various professional complications and romantic misunderstandings, and eventually Jessie decides that she has failed at everything she has tried in England, and that it’s time to give up and move back to New Zealand. Jessie decides to stay with Tom and try again after Tom offers to ride the bus to the airport.

Season Two begins exactly where the finale ended. The homage to the final shot is the beginning. The Graduate, Jessie and Tom sit in the backseat of the bus, confused about what to do next after their alleged happy ever after. Jessie inevitably begins to panic, realizing that she has wasted the money her parents spent to buy her a plane ticket home, and that she has no job and no real reason for still being in England other than this guy with whom she can’t stop arguing. The New Year’s Eve episode comes right before the one with the pregnancy test, and it features multiple encounters with members of Tom’s inner circle — including his suspicious agent Cath (Minnie Driver) and obnoxious brother Vinay (Parth Thakerar) — that leaves Jessie wondering how much longer the relationship can last. We are reminded repeatedly throughout both seasons that Jessie has the maturity of middle schoolers and the attention spans of fleas.

By the time we see Jessie sitting on the toilet, it is clear that this would be a horrible development in Jessie’s life. Starstruck It feels possible that she is pregnant. She has taken her emotional well-being very seriously. For a few seconds there, it seems as if things are at minimum going to become quite messy — Tom insisting on doing the right thing, Cath assuming this is part of Jessie’s nefarious plan to trap her famous boyfriend, Jessie repeatedly proving herself to be unfit for impending motherhood — if not the series getting outright somber for a while. The context has been carefully and clearly established, and Matafeo plays Jessie’s pained tears with a conviction and force that belies her comedy resume. The possibility of the show being about a pregnant woman becomes more probable as Jessie moans.

It is because Jessie simply misunderstood instructions that the realization of this happens so funny. This is something we have to believe. We also need to understand the consequences for Jessie. Once we find out what actually happened, we will feel at least as relieved as we are amused at how she has again got things backwards. Naturally Jessie would have misread the box, because that’s just how big of a fool she can be so much of the time.

Then, Jessie, walking out of the toilet without a care in her world, she saunters off. Starstruck She forgets that the pregnancy scare actually happened. It is not something she mentions to Tom or her flatmate Kate (Emma Sidi). The rest of that episode and the one that follow it involves Jessie letting herself get sucked back into the orbit of her terrible ex-boyfriend Ben (Edward Easton), leading to yet another breakup with Tom, and then another dramatic reconciliation in the finale — this time with the two of them waist-deep in a duck pond after yet another decision that Jessie admits she did not think through.

But that’s okay. The audience is still there, even though Jessie may forget about the pregnancy scare. We can’t forget what the scene does to our emotions. That knowledge hangs over every poor decision she makes during the remainder of the season. And even if it didn’t, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a perfect joke set up with a level of detail and patience that would be utterly foreign to the character at the center of it, but not to the woman writing and performing it.

It’s a great shot! It’s a truly Jordan-esque shotStarstruckIt was easy.