This is Love

This is Love is a true-story show about attachment, and it rarely limits that to romance. A neighbor counts. So do a lost dog, a wild hare, a sister, and even hot dogs. The people who lived each story do much of the telling. An interviewer asks plain, practical questions, such as how two people know each other, what someone thought at the time, or how big a park is, and narration links the answers together. 'The French Fries' is the format at its most playful. In Toronto, Kathy keeps finding bags of A&W fries on her porch with the name Rodolphe on them, and her neighbor Harley Rustad hides an old baby monitor in a plant pot to catch whoever is responsible. Mostly the camera catches raccoons and squirrels eating the evidence. Then a theory comes up that repeated cheap deliveries can test whether a house is empty, and the neighborhood oddity becomes more unsettling. 'Feeling Good' is comic in a similar way. Comedian Dan Perlman is told by a stranger at a bar that he looks like Michael Bublé, gets six days to prepare a performance for her mother's birthday, practices the persona with friends in a rented conference room, and ends up lip-syncing. His lesson from stand-up is to play to the people who are enjoying themselves. Then the tone drops. In 'You've Got Mail', Delia Ephron describes the leukemia that killed her sister Nora, the warning that her own marrow was not quite normal, and her marriage to Peter, which saw her through chemotherapy, a ping pong celebration and a relapse. She gives credit to love and medicine together. Animals provide some of the strangest material. Chloe Dalton raised a leveret that drummed on cushions, refused to come inside after a sofa was removed, and later gave birth to her own young in Chloe's office, behind the chair where Chloe worked. In 'A Needle in a Haystack', a lost dog named Buddy sends a Brooklyn Facebook group searching Prospect Park until a handful of wet food coaxes him out of a log. 'Beaver in the Christmas Aisle, Pig in the Pumpkins, Camel on the Run' combines several animal stories, including a pumpkin-loving pig named Carlton and a camel loose on a four-lane highway. The episode list goes further still: an attempt to dive inside the B-15 iceberg, Forrest Fenn's hidden treasure, a pickpocket romance, and Alvin Ailey's ballet for his mother. Episodes often point onward to a book, an article or a film.