Maria Diaz

Why I’m Totally Obsessed With Pulling

I recently watched all of the BBC series, Pulling (which yes I read after the glowing posts on both Jezebel and The Awl, whatever, they usually have excellent taste) and if there was ever a Right Time and a Right Place for a TV show, this was it. If Sex and The City is meant to be idealized, a funny, it'll all work out in the end, version of single life, Pulling is the total opposite. It is the grim reality. Things don't always work out, and many things, maybe even most things don't have a lesson or a neat little pun-filled sentence to wrap it all up.

I appreciated that most of all. Too often, stories about single people try to connect everything, as if every failed relationship was some kind of pieces of a puzzle. Most of the time, we fuck up and get involved in things we shouldn't because we're lonely, because we're tired of trying to have fun, as every coupled person advises. Just go out and have fun, they always say. Oh, if only it was so easy. And I won't deny, there's still fun to be had, but fuck if sometimes I just want someone where you don't have to try.

But, this isn't about me. This is about Pulling and how the show does a brilliant job of showing that desperation, of wanting your life to be more, but not knowing what to do, or realizing that maybe your life will never be more. The main character Donna leaves her fiancee but spends most of the series two seasons relieved he wants her back or frustrated when he starts to move on. You don't want her to get back with him, you know once she gets what she wants, she'll just be bored again. When she temporarily dates someone else, she ruins it with her insecurity about his yuppie friends, preferring the comfort of sitting on the couch with her old boyfriend eating junk food and watching bad movies. She has a one night stand, calls him again and then forces herself to get drunk in her kitchen when she doesn't want to have sex with him. It doesn't frame the sex we have in terms of another notch as you get closer to the goal of Husband (that Sex and the City did) and it doesn't frame it as "empowering." It's complicated; everyone has needs and everyone tries to get them met, to varying degrees. This is the appeal of the show, it doesn't make its characters learn anything for the sake of the TV happy ending. It just is; it just exists.

Or rather, it used to exist. The BBC canceled Pulling last year and the show ended with a one-hour special that aired in May of this year. Its star, Sharon Horgan, who plays Donna appears just as funny in person. And its no wonder she can pull off portraying that slow drudgery: she attributes her success to starting late and wasting her 20s. Like some other late blooming writers you may know blew 6 years of their 20s on shitty office jobs and then proceeded to blow a bit more time not thinking things through. I'm trying to catch up, though. Maybe one day I'll have my very own version of Pulling.