Last year, Starstruck gave us an unlikely whirlwind romance: what next? Clarisse Loughrey reviews the newest series, in which Tom and Jessie try to hang onto their happy ending.
Starstruck: Season 2
My mind keeps replaying the very last shot of Starstruck’s first series. Two lovers—Tom (Nikesh Patel), who is a movie star, and Jessie (Rose Matafeo), once described by a friend as a “little rat nobody”—sit at the back of a bus. Their eyes look as big as planets. There’s ecstasy there, but palpable fear, too.
Jessie was supposed to board a plane back home to New Zealand, having firmly closed the door on her chaotic, aimless London existence. It would never have worked out with Tom, anyway. The whole idea was too silly, too implausible. But when Tom insists on staying by her side until the very last moment, she doesn’t go.
So they sit, side-by-side on that bus, framed like the two doomed but hopeful lovers at the end of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. But that’s the thing about The Graduate—it makes space for both the cynics to read despair in Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross’s expressions, and for the naïfs to believe that they will overcome the challenges of the future. It’s that implicit divide in interpretation, after all, that made for an early red flag in Marc Webb’s introspective rom-com (500) Days of Summer—the ending makes the woman cry, the man light up.
And it’s that unanswered ellipsis that Starstruck’s second series eagerly dives into—albeit in the messy, beautiful, deliriously funny way that Matafeo, the show’s creator, has made her signature style. Jessie risked it all for love. Now what? Well, there are several letters, sent to friends and exes she never thought she’d see again, that must be retracted and apologised for. She has to admit to her parents that the plane ticket they bought has been left unused and wasted. Oh, and of course, she has to chase her suitcase down—she left it on the bus.
After that, the real questions loom into view: once you’ve risked it all for love, how do you suddenly slip back into mundane? When the world seems infinite, what do you do next? “I was going to watch Dunkirk on the plane,” she says, overwhelmed by sudden panic. “And I guess I just never watch Dunkirk now!” Tom and Jessie end up in a basement arcade. They argue somewhere near the dance mats. That night, Jessie will watch Magic Mike Live alone.
Starstruck’s second series never feels quite as pointed as its first, but arguably that’s to be expected. “Realistic Notting Hill” was such a concise pitch that expanding it could only mean diluting it. We watch a misunderstanding followed by a reunion; then a misunderstanding followed by another reunion. A romantic rival is thrown into the mix, in the form of Jessie’s whimperingly manipulative ex Ben (Edward Easton). You have to wonder how many series this show could go on for before Tom and Jessie run out of things to misunderstand.
But Matafeo and her co-writers Nic Sampson and Alice Snedden, who also star, have concocted such a heady mix of romantic fantasy and agonisingly familiar reality that it feels a bit useless complaining about such dull particulars like plot and structure. The first series was BBC Three’s biggest comedy of last year, streamed almost five million times on iPlayer. This series will likely do similar numbers. Matafeo is a sublime screen presence, funny and awkward and sincerely enthused by life. I could watch a series dedicated entirely to Jessie’s hot takes on classic cinema.
It does make you worry that Tom—who’s dreamy in a comforting, dependable sort of way—might only be falling in love with the fantasy of Jessie. When he calls her “kooky”, the word sets off a hundred alarm bells in her head. She’s repulsed by it: quite rightly, I’d say. Funny, awkward women are always in danger of becoming somebody’s manic pixie dream girl. Starstruck, episode-by-episode, has started to grow beyond the concept of “he’s famous, she’s not”, looking at what it takes to foster an honest love that is freed from personal perception.
Among the supporting characters, which include Russell Tovey as a peacocking director and a returning Minnie Driver as Tom’s toffee-nosed agent, are several couples who kind of seem to hate each other but are also kind of in love. Somehow Matafeo and co. make it seem like the romantic ideal. Jessie’s best friend Kate (Emma Sidi) spends much of the series vaguely mortified by her boyfriend Ian (Al Roberts)—he insists on wearing a flat cap to one Tom’s fancy shindigs, for a start—but you’ll always catch them in the corner of the frame, quietly basking in each other’s glow.
I want that for Tom and Jessie, too, but that would require sacrificing any future seasons of Starstruck. It’s quite the conundrum.
