Like You’re the Worst, Love also delves into the question of how people grapple with their own issues while falling for another person. Gus is arrogant about his good-guy status. Mickey is trying to figure out how to be in love and maintain her substance addictions. But Love is not about an alcoholic or a sex addict falling in love. Rather than harping on Mickey's struggles, the show reveals them slowly.

“We didn't want Mickey’s addictions to take over story-wise,” Love co-creator Lesley Arfin told Refinery29 via email. “It's just a part of her character. It doesn't define her entirely.”

Arfin explained that she wanted to subvert expectations of what an addict looks like. “Jesse Pinkman is one version of an addict. Betty Ford is another,” she wrote. “There isn't a ‘type’ of person who is immune to addiction. Why would we limit ourselves? Why cheat a viewer from having a different experience? Clichés and stereotypes might be easier for some people to swallow, but really I just think it's lazy writing.”

Arfin told us that she thinks the show has “just scratched the surface” of Mickey’s addiction in its first season. "Mickey lies in AA meetings. Why would someone do that? I mean, I have an idea, but I don't think Mickey does," Arfin said. "We might not ever hear firsthand Mickey's path to self awareness. Hopefully it's something we will see as she evolves as a person. But who knows? Maybe she won't evolve? Maybe that's not her path?"

In the finale of Love — spoiler alert — Mickey finally comes clean to Gus. “I’m an addict,” she tells him. “I’m a drug addict and I’m an alcoholic and I’m a sex and love addict and I think I just need to be by myself for maybe, like, a year.” He kisses her anyway, but it feels like a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, these are the people who are supposed to be together — it is a romantic sitcom — but his decision to ignore her request could be detrimental to them both.

It would be inaccurate to reduce Mickey and all of these other characters to a mere trope. These shows are introducing us to women who are more than the sum of their problems, all while pulling them down from an unfair pedestal of coolness. ("Being cool is bullshit, and falling for that lie is something both Mickey and Gus have in common," Arfin told us.) By the end of the series, we can actually relate to the cool girl instead of wishing we were more like her. And that's refreshing.