Hello Ladies Season Finale Preview: The Drive

Stephen Merchant’s HBO comedy Hello Ladies’ first season is only eight episodes, which unfortunately means that this Sunday marks the series’ first season finale. We can only hope that HBO will see fit to bring this series back for a second season. In the meantime, let’s look at the preview for next Sunday’s “The Drive.”

Judging by the preview, the titular “drive” of the episode appears to involve Stuart, Jessica, Wade and Kives. Where are they going? Are they hitting the town or is there some other destination ahead? Something tells me it’ll be the journey that’s more relevant to this episode than the destination. As last Sunday’s episode left off, Stuart actually managed to turn a potential doormat situation — because that’s what you are when you let a beautiful woman and her hook-up run up your room service bill and use your bed for a quickie — into a potential actual date. She wants a nice guy, and Stuart just so happens to be a nice guy — most of the time. He can be a bit insensitive sometimes, but we’ll get to that. In the meantime, is anyone else banking on him messing up this situation? The preview hints that he’s already overthinking how to handle this girl, which may end up resulting in him losing his chance with her.

Here’s the thing that draws me back to Hello Ladies each week: I can’t decide if I like Stuart better when he’s winning or losing. The latter seems to be the case more often than not, but seeing him get that text at the end of last Sunday's episode made me smile, so maybe it’s a little bit of both. He’s something of an underdog, but he’s also a bit of his own worst enemy, and he has a tendency to ignore what really matters, including -- on occasion -- his friends. Take the pool party (“Pool Party”) as a prime example. He was kind of a jerk to his friends (and their friends) and in the end, when the party got good, he found himself stuck on the outside of the gate. It’s moments like those when it’s hard to feel all that sympathetic toward him. He’s so busy wanting to be what he isn’t that he doesn’t remember to enjoy what he is. And then we see him dancing with Jessica and it's evident that he does actually care about his friends, when he remembers to.

It helps that his friends are kind of messes also. It was borderline uncomfortable watching Jessica force that woman to watch her webseries at the wedding. But I like that kind of uncomfortable, which I guess is why I’m loving this series. It requires the ability to laugh while cringing, and after The Office (both UK and U.S.) I think many of us have gotten a lot of experience doing that.

Be sure to tune in to the finale Sunday night at 10:30 p.m. ET so HBO knows we want more Hello Ladies!