There’s something magical about Amazon Prime’s With Love, a family based holiday rom-com that takes five episodes — and five different holidays — to tell four completely different love stories that manage to both complement each other, and also show very distinct sides of the journey of …love. Because love doesn’t look the same for all of us, but love is just that, love. And we can embrace it, and enjoy it — even if it makes us suffer, at times — because, in the end, love is worth it.
With the holidays around the corner and family reunions getting closer and closer, we thought this would be a good moment to give you 5 reasons to watch Amazon Prime’s With Love, starting with …
Latine Christmas
There aren’t that many (scratch that, any) holiday movies featuring latino characters where we get to see the family dynamics that are very common in our communities. In With Love, however, we get everything, from the sibling camaraderie (lying for each other, check), to the abuelita checking if you were at church, to the Christmas party/gathering with a lot of food, a lot of people and a lot of opinions.
It struck me while watching the Christmas episode that I had never seen anything that resembled one of my family gatherings on TV, ever. And it’s truly one of those things you don’t realize mean a lot to you, until you see it.
All the Holiday Cheese
Which doesn’t mean there wasn’t cheese! There was. Oh, beautiful, rom-com cheese. The misunderstandings, and the miscommunications, and the way you’re kinda rooting for one couple, only to then change your mind. Plus, there’s the way things just click when they have to, because that’s what a good romance is supposed to have.
The beauty of this show is that it doesn’t deliver that just once, it delivers it over and over and over again, with different stories told in different ways, from different perspectives and with characters who are at different point of their lives. And it’s all really, really engaging and just the right side of cheesy that you want during the holidays.
Real Diversity
Sometimes you watch a diverse show and you feel like the diversity is …well, just window dressing. Either there are diverse actors but they aren’t really playing diverse characters, or they’re playing caricatures of diverse characters because the people behind the property just aren’t diverse enough to be able to tell diverse stories correctly. With Love, however is a diverse show, with diverse creators telling a story that is familiar to them.
And you can tell.
You can tell by the characters. You can tell by the stories. But you can also tell by the way these people’s journeys are not just about their identities. Instead, this is a diverse family going through normal life, the way it should be. Because we also deserve regular, happy, cheesy rom-coms.
Magic
The best stories, but particularly the best holiday stories, have this sort of …magic. It’s hard to explain what it is, or how it’ll make you feel, but it’s the thing that will keep you watching after the first episode, the kind that made it so I couldn’t stop till I knew how these stories were going to end. The thing that kept me thinking about them long after I was done.
It’s the magic of a well-told story. The magic of good actors, great chemistry and a team behind the scenes who cares about the story being told. And that’s the kind of magic we want to invest in, the kind we hope we get to see more of.
Agree? Disagree? What did you think of With Love? Share with us in the comments below!
With Love is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
