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The premise felt like Joan is Awful mashed up with some other black mirror eipisodes and the Truman Show with the aim of recreating the feeling of the San Junipero episode. There were quite a lot of obvious plot devices like the whole movie having to be acted in real time without skips/reshoots etc. Which broke the suspension of disbelief.

Issa Rae is simply awful, I'm not sure she's supposed to be quite this terrible, although one can't imagine the finished film product if her acting is this awful. There's almost zero chemistry between her and Emma Corin sadly. Corin sparkles, and her realization of her character's history and closeted downfall is poignant and touching in a world where same sex romances are forbidden.

This might be a veiled commentary on how you can't just race and gender swap characters without changing the dynamics of movies utterly. Rae's character mentions how absurd the premise that she as a POC in this scenario would be accepted when the movie is set and it's a legitimate complaint which is explained away but it renders the output faintly ridiculous and incongruous, even to a modern audience.

I really wanted to like this. I really like all three leads in other things, but I found this pandering and stereotyped. The gay community has evolved past this sort of thing to a dull mainstream existence, so it doesn't seem realistic in the modern age. The laugh track is cringe, and the setup seems... dated.

It clearly does want to evoke memories of the Golden Girls and Will and Grace: a hot man as dumb as Joey from Friends, with a dash of Lucille Bluth in the form of the mother, but it seems stagey and overacted and the situation contrived. The gags illicit the odd chuckle in a gently humorous way, don't get me wrong, but in an eye-roll kind of way. The sets look like sets on a network comedy from the Golden Girls era. The whole thing is like something from the past in many ways.