YOU ME HER | A SHOW WITH POTENTIAL LIMITED BY OUTSIDE FORCES

You Me Her is an American–Canadian Comedy-Drama Television Series that revolves around a vanilla suburban married couple who seek to spice up their mundane romantic life by entering a polyamorous relationship. The series is set in Portland, Oregon and was created by John Scott Shepherd. The series is also promoted as TV's "first polyromantic comedy". On June 9, 2016, Audience Network renewed the series for a second and third season. On July 27, 2018, the series was renewed for a fourth and fifth season. The fourth season premiered on April 9, 2019.

On May 10, 2019, Audience Network announced that the fifth season would be the last season and Gail Harvey would be directing all the episodes for the season. However, Audience Network ended operations on May 22, 2020, prior to airing the remaining episodes. The season was released in full on Crave in Canada on June 7, 2020. Seasons 1-5 were aired on Netflix in Europe and Latin America. In 2022, all five seasons were found to be available in the United States on Freevee.

The Series currently does not have a Critic Rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it does have an Audience Score of 83%. It is not on Metacritic at all, and a 7/10 on IMDB (based on almost 11,000 reviews).

So, let me start with the positive…this show definitely had its moments. The show’s premise was certainly a fresh take on the romantic comedy genre in television format, which is what drew my attention to it when I was scrolling through shows on Amazon Prime. The show was also funny for the most part. The writing was everything you would expect from such a show. But this show was ultimately done in before it ever got out of the gate, mostly by external forces.

First, this show had small budget, maybe even a shoestring budget, which mightily hurt the show’s production value. Secondly, this show didn’t need fifty episodes in order to tell the story they ended up telling. What reaffirmed my feelings about that fact was the back and forth that the couple endured throughout the show’s five year run, to the point where I actually got to a place with this show where I stopped caring whether or not the three main characters would ever get together. I think if the show had been a season shorter they could have still gotten off everything they wanted to, without the show becoming stale, but then again, that’s just my take.

And then finally, it really hurt the show that they couldn’t seem to hold on to prominent supporting cast members from season to season. In season one, Chelah Horsdal plays Lori Matherfield, the Trakarsky’s nosey neighbor. She also had a daughter, Ava Matherfield, who blackmails the pair after finding out they’re in a poly relationship with Izzy, played by Laine Macneil. These two characters were pretty funny and really impactful as far as the story was concerned in seasons one and two, but by season three they were both gone, apparently “moved away”. And I thought Jennifer Spence was really funny as Carmen Amari, the wife of Dave Amari, neighbors to the Trakarskys, and Emma’s best friend. But she was noticeably missing in the final season. And the showrunners did their best, I suppose, replacing her with Aliyah O’Brien, who played Sophie, Dave’s sister, but it wasn’t the same, and here again, I think this really hurt the show.

I think this show is a prototypical example of wasted potential. I think it would have done much better on a bigger, better established network, with a much larger budget, and maybe even different actors. Because, for a show about a polyamorous relationship, I feel like it tip toed around that relationship for the entirety of its five season run.

The show seemed to be afraid to go ahead and say what it was trying to say. Even with it being a dark comedy, I felt like it worked really hard to shy away from any kind of sexuality whatsoever. And I kind of wish we had gotten at least some of that here, because even after watching this, I don’t have any more idea of the sexual dynamics of poly relationship than I did before watching the show. I didn’t really learn anything in that regard. And I just think that, if I had, I might have seen more value in this show than I did.

The series is currently available on Amazon Prime with Premium Subscription.