Pop Culture Happy Hour - The Love Hypothesis

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

The Love Hypothesis brings the beloved trope of fake dating to the world of science and academia – but does it bring a fresh take to the bestselling book by Ali Hazelwood? The new Prime Video movie follows Stanford graduate student Olive (Lili Reinhart). Her best friend Ahn (Rachel Marsh) is holding back from pursuing a guy because she thinks Olive is interested in him. Olive wants Ahn to follow her heart, so she lands in a fake-dating situation with a notoriously harsh post-doc Adam (Tom Bateman), who for reasons of his own agrees to be her pretend boyfriend. If you’re looking for more romantic comedies, check out these episodes:Olivia Wilde is a problematic dom in 'I Want Your Sex'‘Office Romance’ stars J.Lo as a CEO with a bad case of Brett Goldstein‘You, Me & Tuscany' has got us lost in the pasta sauceConnect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour, the podcast that keeps you plugged in about the latest and greatest in pop culture. Now, if you're a pop culture enthusiast that's not following the show yet, we're recommending you fix that right away by following Pop Culture Happy Hour on your favorite podcast app. It's really, really common in rom-coms, really common to center it around this really kind of lovable female lead character and kind of not bother to write the guy. And I think this is one where I'm not speaking about the book, but in the movie, the best-selling rom-com novel, The Love Hypothesis, brings the beloved trope of fake dating to the setting of science and academia. And now it's a movie full of misunderstandings, suppressed feelings, rifts and reconciliations. I'm Linda Holmes, and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is Margaret Willison. She's a culture writer who is also teaching a class about Jane Austen.

Hello, Margaret. Welcome back. Hi, Linda. Thanks for having me. Of course, also with us is Christina Tucker. She's the co-host of the podcast, Wait, Is This a Date? Welcome back, Christina. Hello, hello.

I'm thrilled to be here on this day. It is always so wonderful to have both of you and both of you together. The Love Hypothesis is based on the bestselling 2021 novel of the same name, which was the debut of author Ali Hazelwood. It tells the story. of a Stanford graduate student named Olive, played by Lily Reinhart, who's a cancer researcher. She's got a tight circle of friends, and she realizes that her best friend, Anne, is holding back from pursuing a guy they both know because she thinks Olive is interested in him. Olive decides, as only a character in a romantic comedy can, that the best solution is to create the impression that she's in another relationship, so On will feel free to follow her heart.

This lands Olive in a fake dating situation with a notoriously harsh postdoc named Adam, played by Tom Bateman, who, for reasons of his own, agrees to pretend to be her boyfriend. So we're fake dating? Yes. Sorry. No, it's just, I mean, it's just so... Unbelievable that you would date Dr. Ebel. You get absolutely no points for guessing whether Adam will turn out to be less mean than everyone thinks he is, or for guessing whether they will fall in love. But of course, as always, it's about the journey.

The Love Hypothesis is streaming now on Prime Video, so we should note Amazon supports NPR and pays to distribute some of our content. Christina, I'm going to start with you. How did you like The Love Hypothesis? Here's the thing about the love hypothesis. I found it as a movie to be quite mid, just middle of the road. I was not offended while watching it. I was not furious while watching it. I just kind of was watching this movie for the duration of the time it was on the screen.

I will say what I do really appreciate, I do think Lily Reinhart is deeply charming. And I find her ability to kind of elevate just kind of based on her charisma alone, the source material, very refreshing. And I think needed. And I think it could have been unwatchable had her presence not been there. But I do think she brought what would have been kind of bad mid, kind of closer to an acceptable mid. But we are just to be clear, staying in mid. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Margaret, how about you? Would you think about the love hypothesis? Yeah. When I set out to see if my screener would work, the good thing was, like, I got immediately sucked in, you know, and I was just watching the movie. And I was like, okay, well, that's got some momentum to it.

But when my computer battery died an hour and a half in, I was like, okay, I'll get back to it when I do. Yeah. So I feel like that's the space we're in. It's like surprisingly watchable. Again, I would credit. Lily Reinhardt for that. And I would also credit, I feel like I haven't read the source material, but because I live in the world of romance readers, I feel like I know of it. I think I could have told you who to recommend it to, right, just by vibes. So knowing it comes from source material, I think I'm glad that they did as much as they did to ground the significance of the friendship that prompts the fake dating trope because I could easily see that being some something they kind of got left on the cutting room floor as you're adapting what is meant to be a romantic love story.

What could you possibly see in Dr. Evil? I mean, I get it. He's super hot, but most serial killers are. He's nice. Nice. Do you have a brain tumor? Wait, do I have a brain tumor? Despite the truly clunky dialogue on has to deliver, I think that that relationship being the story, starting point and the engine for the story worked well for me. Yeah. Let me say first. I think with a story like this, a lot of it comes down to, is this to your taste? When it comes to rom-coms, I mean, a lot of people who follow romance know that there are these kind of tropes in romance that people refer to in shorthand, enemies to lovers, whatever. There's only one bed, blah, blah, blah. This is fake dating. It's also a little bit enemies to lovers. And it's sort of part of a long, long, long, long, long tradition of a woman who is sort of nice and amenable and kind to everyone, falling in love

with a man who is apparently mean and harsh and rude. I will say at the beginning of the movie, he's kind of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory coded, but only for a short time. But then that kind of goes away and you don't get that feeling from him. So then you're dealing more with just a sense that maybe he's just kind of harsh and make students cry and stuff like that. I was just having a conversation online with somebody recently about the fact that the older I get, the less patience I have for not just enemies to lovers, but like nice woman, mean man. Yeah, grumpy sunshine. As a setup. Yeah, I guess. Grumpy sunshine. Thank you.

And again, if you invert those tropes a little bit, if you're playing with them, if it's like, oh, it's grumpy sunshine, but like it's two men and or it's grumpy sunshine. And the grumpy one's the small one. Right. And the sunshine one's the big one. Like, you can do something playful, but it's literally like grumpy sunshine and it's like big, tall man, scowling. And like, sprayy little girl. Isn't she adorable? Doesn't she eat so much sugar? Isn't it cute?

How much sugar he eats. Oh, boy. Yeah. And the thing that's interesting about this is that the origins of this story, it started off as fan fiction, as Star Wars universe fan fiction of the Ray and Kylo Ren variety. Yes, it did. Which I would expect to fall into this. I mean, that goes beyond grumpy sunshine, right?

That's that's... Right. That goes a little further into, like, genocidal dictator vibes. That's murderous, not murderous? It's a messy space. So I'm not surprised that it's not to my taste. With that said, I loved the friends in this movie so much that it almost... I think the biggest challenge for the romance is that to me, Olive is surrounded by friends

who are more interesting than she is and who I wanted to watch more than I wanted to watch her. as On, who's played by Rachel Marsh, who I think is really terrific in this and really so charming and lovely. When she's sort of like potentially going to get together with their friend Jeremy, I was like, why isn't the movie about them? Can the movie be about them? Let's watch this rom-com. Right. I want to watch the movie about them. And it's a very common problem in romantic comedies.

Very common in romance generally, actually, that the friend is a better and more interesting character than the lead. Yeah. As I like to say, the alto couple? Exactly. That's exactly what it is. And it goes, you know, there's a long tradition of this. And I think this does suffer from that. As it evens out, I thought it was pretty bad at the beginning. As it evens out, it's fine.

I think mid is exactly where I ended up also. It's interesting. I had the same feeling, Linda, about the friend specifically. I think there's one line that Jubuki Young White delivers where he says, like, It's called self-care. It's for kids. gay guys too. Like self-cares for gay men too. And he says it just so earnestly and so sincerely. And I was like, he's great in this. That's just a delight. Like, it is a delightful space to see

kind of in a romance having a woman who has like a full life and you can like kind of understand that like these people mean something to her and you understand those kinds of connections. It does unfortunately hit one of my current contemporary romance bugaboo's, which is everybody gets like one ethnic friend, one gay friend. Like, it's very. very much like we have to have these kinds of, you know, personalities rounding out the group of our straight white woman or else like something will fall apart. And like I understand where it's coming from and I understand why it's happening. And I know the intentions there are good. But it is once you start to notice it, it's like, oh yes, every single white woman has like an ethnic

friend and a gay friend and sometimes two gay friends. No, has a whole tampon commercial. It's like it is very tampon commercial sometimes. Yeah. I think in this version, I think they did a good job of casting people who actually made those characters feel real and lived in. I think that's right. And not just kind of like, here is, you know, your stand in for friend. Here is, you know, your gay bestie. Like they felt like real people. And maybe even too much to the point where I was like, well, I don't actually care about the main people that this is about. I'd rather be hanging out with Malcolm when he's going to parties. Yeah. I don't really care for a grumpy sunshine when we're dividing in along typical hetero lines. But I do love fake dating as a trope typically. Typically,

that is extremely my jam. And in this, you just don't get any of the pleasures you typically get from fake dating, which for me comes from like the man recognizing all the little symbolic things he needs to do to sort of make you seem valued. As a woman who spent a significant amount of time dating in my lifetime, I'm typically like, men only have that awareness when they want to weaponize it against me to show that I like am not important and don't matter. And so to get to see the inverse of that, where it's like in, to all the boys I loved before, when Peter knows that, like, people will know they're in a real relationship if, like, he has a picture of her. The lock screen. On his block on his lock screen. When characters have that kind of awareness and that kind of social cue reading, like, that's what really brings the joy for me in fake dating.

And we don't get like any of that here. Yeah. The most we get is like, oh, he remembers that she has that one character trait, which again, she loves. candy. And so like one time he like leaves her candy and it's like oh my God, it's like he understands her. Yeah. Well, and one time he changes her sugary drink for a healthful green juice. So that's also paying attention in a different way. Yeah, that was supposed to be charming and I found it sort of, I think that's controlling. I said, brother, did you just throw my drink away in the garbage? Yeah, yeah. I was like, I don't think I agree with your police work there in terms of how

that plays. Well, we'll have much more about the love hypothesis after the break. Welcome back. If you're not following Pop Culture Happy Hour yet, hit that follow button on your podcast app and stay plugged in to everything PCH has to offer. Part of the reason why this as a fake dating story does not work so well for me is that neither one of them to me has a great reason for wanting to engage in fake dating. Now, listen, fake dating always seems like rather a ridiculous solution to almost any problem. Sure. But in this case, the business about On, as much as I love On in this movie and I love their

friendship, as Margaret kind of alluded to, I think the exact details of how that plays out do not make a lot of sense. His is even more of kind of an afterthought. His wanting to get involved in this is kind of even more than afterthought. And I will say it's really, really common in rom-coms, really common to center it around this really kind of lovable female lead character and kind of not bother to write

the guy. And I think this is one where I'm not speaking about the book, but in the movie did this guy, did this character really get written? Because I don't want to blame the performance, but I think, as I said, there's that weird shift

from him seeming kind of neurodivergent coded maybe in the way that TV and movies do with talking about it. But then later, you don't really get that. And so, because I don't think they really are prepared to write a romance in that space, which you can do, but which requires some sensitivity and some particular thinking. I have not read this book, but I have read another one of Ali Hazelwood's kind of stem romances, as they call them. I think the books are a little weirder. I think the books have a little more. I have to agree. I think the books have a little more

of an embrace of the lead characters kind of having conversations about things that a lot of rom-com characters don't have conversations about because they are interested in science and because they do think about things in a very scientist kind of way, which is sort of fun and different. And I think that's one of the things that's charming about the book. And I do think that although there are like a couple of moments where they reach for that in the film. It's not earned. I think a lot of that is sanded down. This doesn't feel to me as much like a love letter to people who work in STEM as the book perhaps did, the one that I read. Yeah, I did read this book and I gave it kind of a re-skim in preparation for this as a dedicated culture enjoyer. And I think for me,

what really, what really sticks out in this book to me is the amount of how much it feels like the fan fiction it was coming from. But there is in that, there is a lot more kind of built out grounding of these people who kind of, yeah, they feel like real people who, are real scientists who have like conversations about the work that they're doing and that conversation kind of bleeds into everything. I do think the book and the movie kind of suffer from another one of my contemporary romance issues, bugaboo's. We are on number two for those counting, where it does start to feel like what we start with the tropes and work backwards from there as opposed to like starting from these are two characters who would like to tell a

story about what's going to come naturally out of that as opposed to feeling like this feels like I would like to tell a story about fake dating and possibly go a workplace romance and enemies to lovers. And I'd like there to be like an only one bed bit. And then we'll just kind of work their characters to get to those places as opposed to kind of naturally following where those characters are going and like what journey that may take them on. And I do think that that is something that sticks in my crawl a little bit more these days than it used to. I think it's just kind of feeling a little more repetition in that space. There was no yearning. I needed more yearning.

I'm confident based on the structure of this movie that in a book, it feels like a slow burn. But there is no slow burn here. It's just like, oh, well, I guess at this moment, because it's what happens in the plot, this is when we're going to consummate our relationship. Right. Yes. And this is when suddenly a lot of the difficulties of communicating just kind of aren't there anymore. Yeah. Like, there's a very interesting setup where you're like, oh, I can see how it would be difficult.

to have a conversation about this because there's an evil character and they evilly say it'll have these evil consequences and they're right. It would realistically have those evil consequences. And then things that would trigger those consequences happen and like none of the negative consequences appear. And I'm like, okay, well, we were in a real space for a second and I didn't love being in that space, but I was like at least we're being honest, but now we're retreating from it and we're back in a sort of fairy tale space. Yeah. We are in fairy tale stem in a lot of ways. And this is kind of like a fairy tale Stanford experience that's occurring at this time. There's one point where Onkicks someone away from his experiment that is a timed observation.

And I was like, I don't think On would do that. I think On would take her best friend to a different room that's private and let her fellow scientists continue conducting their experiment. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There is so much here that I wanted to sort of be able to enjoy. I think, you know, I think Lily Reinhart has something, but I think, I think there's not enough kind of oomph in this character maybe. So even she, I think, is a little bit, comes off a little bit flat here.

She does. But when you talk about, you know, Djibuki Young White as Malcolm and Rachel Marsh is on, I think you get so much charm and so much, like so much of romance is about building up a world. in which these people can meet and fall in love. And I think that part went really well. Yeah. There's also a very quick kind of waving off of the fact that she is a PhD candidate and he is a postdoc. Yeah, I had a hard time letting that go personally. He's in charge of one of her friends.

Right. And makes employment decisions about that friend based on his relationship with her. Right. And so there's a little bit of like, there's a little bit of like, there's a. moment where she says, well, wouldn't this be violating some kind of rule if we were to have this fake relationship? And he says, oh, no, I checked. It's okay for a, it's okay for a grad student to date a postdoc if they're in different fields of study. I have no idea whether that's true. I have no idea. I don't even know if I really remember exactly how their fields of study relate to each other.

And the fact remains that he's employing one of her friends. And it becomes an issue in their relationship. And That's how you know it's not a good idea. And not only do they kind of breeze past it in this conversation, but like nobody else seems to notice it or say, you know, she immediately says, is that something you're supposed to do? Right. But like the other people that he's trying to impress by having this girlfriend. Right. Don't seem to have any issues. Would that work?

Because wouldn't any of them say, I don't know if I think that's a great idea while your lab is in. employing one of her close friends. I mean, it may not be violating any rules, but there's definitely some weirdness around their positions that's not tackled. And the bigger problem is like, yeah, it's definitely a bad idea. And there's not enough chemistry between these two leads, nor enough charm to the telling of their love story that I'm distracted from these like moral ethical questions. Like, is it moral and ethical to pretend to be engaged to a man you've had a crush on while he's in a coma? of course. After you saved him as a subway token collector as Sandra Bullitt doesn't while you were sleeping. No, absolutely not. That's a very, very, very frightening storyline if you take Sandra Bullock out of it. In real life, it would be terrible. But Sandra Bullock's there. So you're like, I mean, of course she would. Her father's dead. She needs family. It's the holidays. She needs a family. Right. And she doesn't know how to tell them. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of support built in that movie, a lot of scaffolding around the idea that she doesn't know how to tell them. This was very scaffolding. fold less. This needed more. This one is very, they just kind of do this and nobody really

react in the way that I would expect at least somebody. Because like if she thinks it might be a violation of the rules, how come nobody else thinks it might be a violation of the rules? It was a little distracting to me as a former student affairs staff assistant for a PhD granting institution. I was like, this would actually be kind of a huge deal. I do not think that all of his colleagues and all of like, you know, the other faculty would be like, oh, lovely to have you at the cocktail party. Like, I think it would be a little more dramatic than that. Right. I brought the grad student. I'm dating. Oh, wonderful. It's great to meet you. And it's not that people date. Like, I'm not, I'm not a... It's not to say it doesn't happen. Trust. I'm not an infant.

Like, people, people date, right? It was a split second decision, Linda, and he was the only option available. It's just incredible that you don't know that. Because, again, their labs are quite close together, because they do kind of work similarly near one another. I think the absence of scaffolding, is something that comes from a certain type of adaptation where like honestly the safest adaptation of a very, very popular item is like I haven't actually tried to make this into a movie in its own right? I haven't actually tried to fully capture the charms of the original but I've done a very competent visual cliff notes of the thing you already love.

And if you love it, you're going to come and you're going to watch it and you're going to remember all of the things you loved about the original. And you're going to be like, that was a successful item. I think that is where we are, like, even based on my skim of the novel, I was like, they are, like, they were pulling a lot of dialogue kind of directly from the book. Oh, boy, you could tell. Yeah, and which is why it sounded so much like people reading pages from a book at times. Right, which is why On speaks exclusively in, like, tote bag slogans, especially when she's

interacting with male scientist characters. You're like, okay. Yes. She's like, ladies in STEM, hashtag Black Girls Who Code. Yeah. Yeah, it's very that. a lot of that, but it is faithful. And again, huge critic to the actor who really, really, like, manages to make that character charming, even with that terrible dialogue. Yeah. But yeah,

you can definitely feel that this is something that has been very, like, laboriously faithful to the original, kind of to its detriment. Yeah. There is less sex in the movie than there is is. Again, there's less yearning. And I was going to say not to be a purve on Maine, but like, it is a little weird to have kind of a beloved kind of dirty romance now adapted and kind of we're just going to have the sex scene and we're going to kind of just, it's going to be very tasteful, it's going to be very loving and we're going to just kind of move past that. Right. Where I'm kind of like in, let's say it, in a post-heated rivalry world, like, I think we have

proven that we can handle more content in that way. And the thing that's interesting is they have all the, they keep all the swearing, which I was interested in the fact that like they keep all the swearing. which means they're it's not they're not trying to make it you know PG round com. Right. It's a thing you can do. They're okay keeping all the swearing, but they take out a lot of the sex, which I agree with you, Christina.

I think that's a curious decision in the current moment. And to have such a formulaic sex scene, such a character-free sex scene is like, well, and just one. I did not learn anything about them as people based on that sex scene. I was like, yep, this is the sex that men and women have. Awesome. And by the way, while we are talking about things that do and do not work about the whole setup of this romance, I am 1,000% over anything that starts with somebody grabbing somebody else and kissing them without any sort of consent, which book and the film kind of make a little joke out of it. It's not hilarious to me. It's like I just, and again, this is a thing where if it were charming enough, I probably wouldn't care or I could probably. probably get over it, or I could probably be like, well, but in the end, blah, blah, blah. But it does seem, first of all, rather out of character for her based on everything else about her that she would do this.

We're nodding so, so hard. Second of all, again, we are in an academic setting. And even if you make a little joke out of it, you're really not supposed to do that. It can make people uncomfortable. Because I asked you first if I could kiss you. You asked, and then you didn't wait for my consent. I did. You did not.

I did. Mm-mm. I didn't? No. No, I was like, he could file a title non-complaint. That could happen. Yeah. Madam, this is no joking matter.

I don't like to pull this card too often, but if it was a guy grabbing the woman and kissing her without consent, I think it would be pretty easy for people to see. Not, not, not cute. That's not a meat cute. That's a meat, not cute at all. It's a meat ugly. It's a meat anti-cute. It's a meat anti-cute. But again, in the end, I think if you, particularly if you like this book, particularly,

particularly if you like these kinds of books. I think if you sit down and watch this, I don't think you're going to sit there the whole time going, oh, this is really unpleasant and I hate it and whatever. It's just going to flow over you and then you're going to forget all about it. And yeah, the book will still be the book. And then you'll have this also. And I definitely, like, I'm in favor of adopting, like, romance books, you know, whether it's Emily Henry books, like people would meet on vacation or heat of rivalry or anything like that. I like this idea of making, you know, movies. of them. Or series. Me too. I love it. I think it's a great idea and I encourage them to continue it. You just have to kind of, you got to get a little, you got to get a little more specific. You got to get a little more of the specificity of the book into it. Yeah. Be a little more specific. Let us have a little bit more fun with it. And let us see a little more sex. That's what I'm asking. Truly, I get it. Let us see a little more sex. Yeah. I get it. Listen, no wrong time to bring that up. All right. That brings us to the end. of our show, Margaret H. Willis and Christina Tucker. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us, Linda. This episode is produced by Liz Metzger, Lenin Sherburn, Caden Mills, and Mike Passiff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. And to keep listening and keep enjoying, please make sure to follow the show on your favorite podcast app. I'm Linda Holmes, and we will see you all next time.