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Animal Love is a new Argentinian young-adult drama on Prime that involves a trap artist, a rich kid, the rich kid’s “found family” and a shooting that happens in the trap artist’s neighborhood that bonds her and the rich kid together. Yes, it sounds pretty generic.
ANIMAL LOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Two motorcycles chase each other at night. One crashes, then we hear a struggle and a gunshot, with blood splattering on a woman’s face.
The Gist: Kaia (Tatu Glikman) is getting social media views for the video of the trap song that she wrote and performed. She is getting popular enough to book a gig at a club in her working-class neighborhood. But she still works at a barber shop, and takes care of the young daughter of her ex-boyfriend Marqui (Lucas Pose).
Closing up the barber shop, she finds that her motorcycle won’t start. She calls her cousin Walter (Ramiro Firme), who picks her up and takes her to the mansion of a guy named Santos (Santiago Achaga); Walter is a small-time drug dealer and Santos is one of his best customers.
At the mansion, there’s a party being thrown for a guy named Nico (Franco Masini). As Kaia waits for Walter, she meets Nico in a quiet spot in the house. It turns out that he doesn’t like the noise, either, and that the party’s being thrown for him because he’s returned from a psychiatric hospital after a breakdown.
The two of them are definitely attracted to each other, and Nico later slips into Kaia’s DMs and invites her to meet the next morning. This is where he explains to her that Santos and the rest of the people in that mansion are his found family, with Santos “taking care of his people so outsiders wouldn’t hurt us.”
Nico comes to Kaia’s show that night, but is threatened by Marqui’s menacing brother Toto (Salvador Gaetan), who decidedly says that Nico doesn’t belong in that neighborhood. However, this doesn’t scare him off; when he finds Kaia backstage, she finds out that Nico had a twin brother, Ramon, who recently died. The shared trauma draws them together, and they have sex backstage.
She takes him home on her bike, which is when Toto and a friend start chasing them. The result of that chase is not just bloodshed, but something that bonds Nico and Kaia together in a way that’s more than just attraction.
Photo: Prime VideoWhat Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Sebastián Ortega, Animal Love is similar in tone to Euphoria, though the stakes of this show are slightly higher.
Our Take: We’re on the fence about whether Animal Love is going to have a good story or not. It starts out so fast and gets us into the meat of the story — what happens when Nico and Kaia end up killing Toto and his friend — that we don’t really have much of a handle on the two main characters.
Yes, we know that Kaia has dreams of making it with her trap music, taking her out of her rough neighborhood. And we know that Nico is still troubled by the death of his twin brother, as we see him have visions of him in the water next to Santos’ mansion during the party. But for the most part, they feel like pretty typical TV twentysomethings who are immediately attracted to each other because they each have something broken about them that the other person finds irresistable.
After the incident with Toto and his friend, of course, Kaia and Nico will be even further bonded together, and they’ll have to figure out how to avoid getting killed by Toto’s friends as well as keeping the truth from coming out. In the meantime, Kaia’s career will likely take off and Nico’s trauma over Ramon’s death will likely start to overtake him.
But there also is Nico’s found family, featuring Santos and his friend Justina (Valentina Zenere), who went away for months after Ramon’s death. They will also be involved in this story, but all we know about them to this point is that they’re privileged rich kids.
There seems to be a lot of roads for the story to go down. But that would also require us to get invested in these characters, and we just can’t after the first episode. They all feel like flat, very typical young-adult characters who don’t really give viewers a reason to care about whether they get what they want, they get found out, or just about anything else that might happen in this series.
Photo: Prime VideoPerformance Worth Watching: We liked Tatu Glikman’s performance as she spit out Kaia’s rhymes.
Sex And Skin: Whatever sex is in the first episode is shown briefly and the people are fully clothed. There is a debauched scene of nudity in Santos’ mansion, though.
Parting Shot: After Toto gets shot by Nico, Kaia grabs the gun and shoots Toto’s friend as he’s crawling away.
Sleeper Star: Evitta Luna plays Kaia’s friend La Colo, who really seems to have Kaia’s back in the first episode.
Most Pilot-y Line: So much of the show was too dark to discern what exactly was going on, even scenes shot indoors.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Animal Love feels like a generic story with characters that feel like sketches instead of well-rounded human beings, and we’re not sure it’s going to get any better than what we saw in the first episode.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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