Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Meet Cute’ On Peacock, A Near-Perfect Rom-Com Featuring A Time-Travel Tanning Bed

In Meet Cute, Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson star as a couple that keeps re-living their first date over and over thanks to a tanning bed time machine. If it sounds terrible, I promise, it’s really not.

MEET CUTE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Kaley Cuoco, who plays a woman named Sheila, walks in slow motion down a New York City street while “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” plays, her messy blonde hair bouncing on her shoulders. As she reaches her destination, an unreadable smirk spreads across her lips. What secrets does she know? What is this modern-day Mona Lisa thinking?! We’ll find out soon enough (like, moments later, when she reveals to Pete Davidson’s character Gary, whom she seems to have just met, that she’s a time traveler from the future and she already knows him).

The Gist: Sheila is an unhappy woman, and her unhappiness leads her to want to kill herself. On the last day of her life, she decides to at least go out in style with a manicure. After explaining her plan to her nail tech named June (Deborah S. Craig), June shows her the salon’s tanning bed and explains that it has the power to send a person back in time 24 hours. Skeptical, Sheila gives it a try and when she goes back in time, she meets Gary and has the best date of her life.

Sheila continues to go back in time every day for a year solely to re-live her date with Gary. It’s the best night of her life and she wants to preserve it. The thing is that Gary doesn’t believe she’s a time traveler, and he doesn’t remember meeting her from day to day, and after a year, Sheila starts to get bored with Gary and starts picking apart his faults. Mild spoiler alert: That’s when June reveals that, actually, Sheila can travel to any point in time, not just 24 hours earlier, and Sheila decides to travel into Gary’s childhood to erase some of the worst moments he experienced and change his personality so he’s really and truly perfect for her. Spoiler alert, that doesn’t go as planned, and it sends Sheila spiraling into a deeper depression.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Sheila has the power to keep re-living the same day over and over again, a plot convention that appears in so many movies that have come before it. It has a very Groundhog Day vibe though for the first half of the film, she’s not waking up and using her do-over to finally get certain things right, but just to enjoy that same day again and again. Eventually though, she starts tampering with the timeline to start making some changes.

Our Take: Meet Cute is the movie where I finally get the fuss about Pete Davidson. Up until now, I’ve been Pete-agnostic, which is to say I didn’t dislike him and his sense of humor, but I never got that sexy, BDE vibe that the internet always talks about. I totally get it now. As Gary, Pete is funny and sensitive and neurotic and goofy, and you can certainly see why Sheila wants to keep reliving her night with him over and over. And Kaley Cuoco is great as Sheila; she could have played up Sheila’s dark, suicidal vibe in a campy, less serious way, but she adds many layers, some rooted in trauma, some in humor, to Sheila’s personality and they blend seamlessly.

These performances sell the movie, especially because the final third of the movie shifts the tone a bit and we delve into Sheila’s childhood and her depression, which are her motivation for trying to find happiness with Gary. Without giving anything away, the scene of her as a child with the man she referred to as a nice cable guy, brought things together and added more emotion that you’d expect from this kind of movie.

From the first moment that Gary and Sheila are onscreen together, it feels like a real-life first date; the excitement of meeting someone who gets you, that thing where you bounce from place to place, drinking, laughing, walking down side streets not knowing where your final destination might be, and of course, getting dinner at one of the Indian joints on First Avenue in the East Village. (Meet Cute has nailed the New York first date vibe.) It’s obvious why Sheila wants to just exist in that moment. As the plot thickens and she starts wanting to change Gary, things progress slowly to a darker place, culminating in Sheila going back to her suicidal thoughts, but this time, now that Gary is in her life, she needs him to pull her out of it and help her come to grips with the fact that the time machine brought them together, but it may not be the answer to all of her problems.

Sex and Skin: Most of Meet Cute is set during one of Gary and Sheila’s many first dates, when that electric feeling caused by flirtation and newness abounds, but alas, no sex.

Parting Shot: Sheila and Gary walk off into the sunset (okay, they walk over the Manhattan Bridge into DUMBO and it’s sunrise, but still) together.

Sleeper Star: “Don’t fuck with my trauma, Sheila! If I didn’t have these occasional moments of complete and total worthlessness, I wouldn’t have this sparkling sense of humor,” June, Sheila’s nail tech says dryly as she tries to explain why Sheila shouldn’t use her time machine to try and change people’s traumatic pasts. June, played by Deborah S. Craig, is a total scene stealer, her deadpan delivery somehow conveys both apathy and empathy for Sheila, and she is hilarious in the role.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Did you know that Predator has two governors in it? Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger. That has to be a Snapple fact, at least.” The line doesn’t really set up any major plot devices, but it’s one of the many funny lines delivered by Gary during one of his many dates with Sheila, and it’s indicative of why she’s so charmed by him and wants to keep reliving their dates over and over.

Our Call: STREAM IT! I’m a cynic, I can find fault with most of the things I watch because few movies are ever perfect. Honestly, I just really enjoyed Meet Cute, it was an easy, fun romance where, even if I don’t know exactly why I was rooting for these neurotic, damaged characters to get together, I really wanted them to be happy. If I could, I’d go back in time and watch it for the first time all over again.