Stream It Or Skip It?

To Love, To Lose is a new Turkish romance series on Netflix that doesn’t quite know if it wants to be funny, dead serious, or somewhere inbetween. But its got two charming leads and at times a warm small town atmosphere, which goes a long way towards making it watchable.

Opening Shot: A YouTube video where screenwriter Afife Jale (Emine Meyrem) discusses how to structure a story, especially with an event that will change all of the characters’ lives.

The Gist:  Afife wrote a successful TV series, but hasn’t landed a show since, and as she runs errands through her town, everyone asks her how her pitch meeting went. She pitched a new show idea with her friends Defne (Dilşah Demir) and Baturay (Okan Çabalar), but the network executive listening to the pitch thinks it needs more conflict. The exec gives the team a week to come up with a new idea.

That’s going to be tough for Afife, because she also runs a struggling diner in town. When she goes to open the restaurant for the day, though, she finds out that her cook, waitress and dishwasher have all quit to go to the much-better paying new restaurant nearby. She recruits her lounge singer mother Perihan (Asuman Çakır) to cook, her busking brother Ali (Demircan Kaçel) to assist, Defne and Baturay to wait tables, and a woman Ali flirted with while busking to wash dishes.

In the meantime, Kemal (İbrahim Çelikkol), who is the collector for his family’s loan shark enterprise, arrives at a family breakfast hosted by his grandmother. His fiancee Neshlian (Yasemin Kay Allen), who seems to have earned the trust of the entire family, is there.Kemal knows what’s entailed in the family business, but isn’t without compassion; a customer who comes to the breakfast toting a gun, for instance, gets an extension from Kemal. One of the ways he got the customer to not kill himself is by telling him that they’d have to collect from his family if he was no longer there.

When Kemal visits Afife’s diner the next day, Afife is shocked to hear that her mother Perihan went to a loan shark, and that the overdue balance is rapidly gaining interest.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? To Love, To Lose has a similar vibe to Another Self, also a Turkish romantic dramedy on Netflix.

Our Take: The tone of the first episode of To Love, To Lose is a bit all over the place. In the parts where we see Afife trying to keep her diner going despite losing all of her staff at once, the tone is light and airy, leaning towards showing Afife’s loving relationship with her family and freinds, whom she may need to prod to chip in, but end up doing so when Afife is in crisis.

But when we get to Kemal’s side of the story, the tone becomes either wistful, as we see him fantasize about a life away from being the family’s enforcer, or it feels like a crime thriller. It’s pretty apparent that Kemal feels obligated to his family and knows what’s required, but would rather be doing anything but threatening people who don’t pay back their loans.

What we’re curious about is how these tones are going to combine as Kemal’s and Afife’s lives intersect. It’s not a spoiler to say that the two of them are going to start to fall for each other, even as Afife continues to pay back her mother’s loan. So Kemal will have to balance his feelings for Afife (and how that affects his relationship with Neslihan) with the duty he has to his family’s business. Will it be romantic and serious? Romantic and funny? A little bit of all of it? Whatever the answer is, it’ll be tough to balance the series’ varied personalities in an earned way.

Performance Worth Watching: Emine Meyrem’s portayal of Afife makes you believe that her freinds and family will do anything for her, even when she calls them in a panic with an “all hands on deck” message.

Sex And Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Afife tells Kemal that she can’t possibly pay her mother’s debt, given how tight things are with the restaurant. “You’re paying your mother’s debt, with interest,” he tells her.

Sleeper Star: Yasemin Kay Allen’s character Neslihan is very involved in Kamal’s family business, and the way she reacts as Kamal spends more time with Afife will be interesting to watch.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re sure we’ll find out the exact reason why Afife’s mother borrowed money from Kamal’s family, but we wish we got even a tiny clue about why in the first episode.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While we’re not sure how the varied tones in the first episode of To Love, To Lose are going to mesh, we liked the lead performances enough to give the show a chance to work out its tone issues.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.