meet cute time travel explained

‘Meet Cute’ Review: Pete Davidson and Kaley Cuoco Time Travel in Surprisingly Dark Rom-Com

Come for the time travel, stay for the surprising amount of introspection.

We all want to hit the re-do button at some point in our lives. Heck, some of us might want to do it daily. Or hourly. (You get the idea.) Hollywood has played with the concept of hitting the reset button and getting a second chance in films over and over again. Look no further than the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day or 2020’s wacky, lovely time-loop comedy Palm Springs with Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti . Clearly, us mere mortals have a desire to push our limits and strive for the most impossible and subjective thing: perfection. Meet Cute , the latest project to step into the ring of the re-do, is surely an entertaining addition to this type of storytelling. But should this film really be considered a rom-com?

Meet Cute opens with a close-up on Sheila ( Kaley Cuoco ), the unofficial protagonist in a film with really only two characters, walking down the street in slow-motion. In a matter of seconds, her face wears a series of emotions (confidence, fear, regret, arrogance) which perfectly sums up this character's fragile trajectory. She’s already been through a lot—both emotionally and physically—which she will repeatedly catch you up on with varying levels of honesty as the story progresses. She walks into a bar filled with rowdy sports fans hooting and hollering at the television screens for what is apparently a big deal, though she isn’t the least bit interested. And neither is Gary ( Pete Davidson ), the quiet, horizontal-stripe-loving lad at the bar whose back is deliberately to all the action. His eyes are on the coasters he’s doodling on, and Sheila’s eyes are on him. Love at first sight? Not really.

The charm of this film is that this isn’t Sheila’s first rodeo. She’s actually been in this very moment with these very people several (and eventually hundreds) of times. And she reveals all of that to Gary rather quickly, right after she awkwardly tells him she’s buying an “alcoholic beverage” and asks if he wants one, too. There was really no risk of rejection here, because Sheila knows exactly what Gary’s going to say. She knew his name was Gary, she knew he’d order an Old Fashioned, as well as a number of other specifics that only she could know. Sheila explains that she’s actually from the future, specifically 24 hours in the future, and has been reliving this first date—their meet cute—over and over. As expected, Gary doesn’t quite buy it, but he does play along with this mystery woman’s bizarre claims. Things get even odder when Sheila finally details how she was even able to get into this situation in the first place. She explains to Gary (on what is the viewer’s first date with them) that she was having a great day, and decided to get her nails done. She went to the bathroom and low and behold, there was a tanning bed. Well, it sure looked like one, but Sheila learns from the delightfully stoic June ( Deborah S. Craig ) that it’s actually a time machine. And so, she has been using it to go back in time and relive the “perfect” date she had with Gary.

RELATED: Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson Have a Romantic 'Meet Cute' in New Images

This movie thrives when it focuses on Sheila and Gary’s connection and their awkward, charming “get to know you” banter (even though Sheila supposedly knows everything about Gary) carefully crafted by writer Noga Pnueli . It’s clear these two are a good match for each other, not necessarily romantically, but as best friends. Their conversations and behavior playfully ride the line between being flirtatious and making fun of each other the way two long-time pals would do. They bond over their mutual fair shares of trauma, and the glimmering moments of hope in a bleak world that restore their faith in humanity. Meet Cute steeps much longer in the existential dread of it all than a typical rom-com to really be considered a “rom-com,” which is a bit unexpected considering Cuoco and Davidson are primarily known for their work in the comedy arena. Fortunately, the two actors know how to handle the darker moments just as well. Davidson’s turn as the shy, insecure, squeaky-clean guy was very refreshing and is perhaps his best performance to date. Cuoco effortlessly leans into some of the absurdity and anchors Sheila’s more grounded moments of despair. Let’s also not breeze past Hari Nef ’s expertly deadpan and eerily-accurate summation of artisanal food spots in New York City.

The film tackles a number of heavy topics that are typically not found in the more conventional “girl meets boy” stories that have come before it. The playful premise acts as a Trojan horse of sorts in order to get the meat of this meet-cute story, much of which cannot be revealed in this review. There are a number of developments throughout the film that quickly prove that Sheila is a very unreliable protagonist, which both keeps the story interesting and feels a bit repetitive. After the first two times Sheila tells Gary that she needs to “come clean” about stuff before she admits she’s been lying about some things, it starts to lose its effect.

At times, the story doesn’t quite know what to do with the time travel. Of course, no one in the movie is claiming to be a time travel expert, and it’s probably fair to say that director Alex Lehmann and the other creatives involved aren’t trying (or hoping) to be time travel whizzes, either. Sheila even questions the logic behind it in the beginning and June shrugs it off, which is more of a wink to the audience to not overthink the time-travel “rules” presented. That being said, it’s still a little distracting. Sheila claims to know everything Gary is going to say, but then would sometimes be genuinely surprised and truly taken aback by something Gary says. If she went back to relive the perfect night over and over (after making some controversial changes to Gary’s timeline), why is she only able to predict certain things like his Sophie’s Choice joke and his drink of choice, but not others?

By the end of the film, you will have taken a much darker ride than you probably anticipated. The tone is hard to pin down as it tries to balance the silly inclusion of time travel with the more complex themes of trauma. Meet Cute conveys a great message about how we are our trauma and that removing it wouldn’t solve all—or even any—of our problems. In fact, removing it would actually strip away the beautiful imperfections that make us who we are. If you don’t stress over the logistics of time travel and are willing to appreciate the “deeper meanings” that are on full display, then check out this beautifully shot love letter to the messiness of New York City and life itself.

Meet Cute is available to stream on Peacock now.

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“Meet Cute,” or “Live. Date. Repeat.” as I’m calling it informally, wastes a good time machine. With the bright flash of blue light from a tanning bed, made by New York City nail salon owner June ( Deborah S. Craig ), one can be transported back in time for 24 hours. There's so much that can be done, and June seems pretty open to letting anyone just walk in and use it. It's a bummer that "Meet Cute" sticks us with such a ho-hum date.

“Meet Cute” is a failed experiment of a time travel story, starting with how its titular moment and subsequent date rarely capture our imagination. Sheila ( Kaley Cuoco ) has stumbled across a time machine in a tanning bed at a nail salon, and she has been using its limited ability—only 24 hours in the past or future—to revisit a date with Gary ( Pete Davidson ). The date usually starts the same, with her approaching him at a bar, urging him to ditch the place and walk through the city to get dinner. She usually has a line about her father being a “traveling alcoholic,” and he makes a “Sophie’s Choice” aside when it comes to picking a restaurant.  

But the way the date ends can be a toss-up, especially when Sheila becomes more and more serious about being from the future, which he initially takes as a flirtatious joke. Sheila gets fixated on this connection, and sometimes she goes through the dates as if she wants to weird him out off the bat, telling him how long she has “known” him, even though it’s their first meeting. This fateful night, repeated with different variations because of some desperation that doesn't come into genuine form, is the film's main spectacle.  

Director Alex Lehmann has an eye for some opulent NYC dating spots—the two are covered by shimmering lights inside the Bangladeshi restaurant they always end up at—but their two-hander moments walking down the street create a bland intimacy. On a larger scale, “Meet Cute” doesn’t convey enough of the magic that its most intense character becomes addicted to, and despite Lehmann’s quick cuts and some dry humor from the original script by Noga Pnueli , there’s not much total charisma. Their date, however impromptu, just doesn't have that certain zing of romance to wish we were on it, or had it, or could have it. 

Kaley Cuoco's inner electricity powers much of this entire production, and it’s clear the shortcomings in her character and plot are not from the performance, but the script that gives us a challenging character but treats it too broadly. As she is written, Sheila is supposed to be pushy, electric, desperate, and manic—she’s supposed to be too much. She's also supposed to be a lot dangerous, given how she has to kill her previous self when she steps back 24 hours to avoid a "Highlander" thing. Cuoco gets this all across well, and the performance is good for what it is. Next to her work in “The Flight Attendant,” one can appreciate how much she’s venturing into wilder, more freewheeling parts. 

But “Meet Cute” constantly is weighed down by one particular rhetorical question—it’s all for this guy? Almost like a joke from the script, Sheila’s fixation on Gary becomes ridiculous, and Davidson’s flat performance doesn’t make any more of a case to see what Sheila sees. They have decent enough chemistry in the different repeated chapters of this first date, but Davidson seems lost in how to handle this character without being monotone or too laid back. He’s relatively lifeless in the role as if he were more here to fill in the New York-related scenery.

Only after its initial curious charm has worn off, does “Meet Cute” venture into how the time machine could be used to change the dating partner, and not just how they felt about you at the end of the night. It's a general way of getting to how our partners come from previous formative relationships, but it's too late, and it's certainly too little. It might have been more rewarding for the story to show us more about what else Sheila has been doing while in the past, including killing an evil figure named "Smitson." 

“Meet Cute” then winds these ideas about changing someone to make some pretty disingenuous emotional bids in its third act, to assemble a hollow message about choosing life because of a relationship. No, not even a relationship, a first date. With Gary. The romantic fantasies and the time travel plotting of “Meet Cute” are a total mismatch.  

Now playing on Peacock. 

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Meet Cute (2022)

Kaley Cuoco as Sheila

Pete Davidson as Gary

Deborah S. Craig as June

Sierra Fisk as Sandra

Wesley Holloway as Young Gary

Rock Kohli as Amit

• Alex Lehmann
• Noga Pnueli

Cinematographer

• John Matysiak
• Christopher Donlon
• Stephen Lukach

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Meet Cute (2022) Review & Ending Explained

Meet cute (2022) plot summary & movie synopsis .

The film begins with Sheila (Kaley Cuoco) walking on a gorgeous night in New York, where we see a collection of mundane moments around her. While having her drink, she enters a bar and eyes a young man sitting at the table. After a brief interaction with the bartender motivates her, she goes to have a word with him. While sitting next to him, she starts on an awkward note. She introduces herself, and he introduces himself – as Gary. They have a fun, little chat about their old-timey names, and after their initial state of bonding, she mentions that she’s a time traveler who has come to this day from the future.

He asks all the obvious questions one would ask about the future, and their interaction heads on a sweeter path. They walk out of the bar and start talking about themselves and, despite the casualness of this chat, share some of their personal details. He mentions his not-so-good relationship with his dead father , and she also informs him about her father’s death. On their way, they decide to go somewhere for food where different people try to attract them to their restaurant. He jokes about it being a ‘real Sophie’s choice,’ and she mentions that she loves when he makes that joke. Then, she takes him to a South-Asian restaurant where she says he is coming not from a far-off future but from just 24 hours later. 

She tells the man outside the restaurant when they leave the restaurant that she’ll see him again tomorrow with exceptional ease. He speaks about breaking up with an ex named Amber, and they head for dessert. At a food vehicle, they come across an edgy teen telling them strange names of flavors. They get one of the ice cream cones and speak about their dysfunctional childhoods. She mentions another part of her time travel journey – when she traveled back, and he killed herself – which he thinks to be a joke. After a goof-up at their table, she mentions to him that – ‘It’s okay for things to be messy sometimes’ – to calm him down. When they walk out, she mentions that she has lived this same night for a week already, which baffles him. Why would someone want to travel to the same time over and over again? She finds it significant that she gets to behave any way she wants and relive the night.  

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In one of the later encounters, she seems to have gotten bored of being with him or their good time together for just a night, not leading anywhere concrete. Instead of the cutesy way their nights worked out before, this night shows them annoyed with one another. Later, she mentions her idea to Anil (the man outside the restaurant) to travel back in time and change Gary as a person, to heal his traumas or to help him not go through them. Anil finds it silly. People don’t change, he mentions. But she decides to do it anyway.

She feels she can take his pain away, making all of these efforts sane. Registering his frustration with this thought, she decides to travel back again to reverse her decisions. She feels this would enable the things between her and Gary to return to the way they used to be. But June breaks her bubble, shares her own traumas, and mentions how these enabled her to be the person she is today. ‘If you erase the pain, you erase the person, she says.

Meet Cute (2022) Review

A well-directed new york romance with weak writing.

When I first saw the film’s title and Pete Davidson in the lead, it instantly took me back to an SNL skit , which pokes fun at the cliches of romance. What appears like a cocktail of Linklater’s Before trilogy (due to its ruminating conversations) and Groundhog Day, ‘Meet Cute’ is a neatly directed film. It is essentially a romantic comedy that uses the elements of time travel. Alex Lehmann, who worked on gut-wrenching indie films like Paddleton and Blue Jay , shows his prowess at finding the beauty in the mundane. He makes this conversational film find a breeziness tone whenever required and soaks you in the gorgeousness of New York at night. 

Yet, the way its screenplay written by Noga Pnueli binds obsessive infatuation with trauma-bonding feels insipid. A bond formed by such conditions does not sound like a healthy relationship, even when the director’s ability and execution make it seem like a genuinely romantic tale. So, the film falters when it starts to show cracks in its writing. Besides that, Kaley Cuoco’s performance seems overdone, like the animated gestures she is used to in her sitcom career. Some of the film’s crucial moments lose their impact for the same reason.

Meet Cute (2022) Ending Explained 

After the end of their date, Gary walks to the nail salon where June works and asks her about the time machine. She lets him go back in time, where he reached Sheila’s childhood when she was tiny. He sees signs of irresponsive parents in her life but tries to calm her down after she gets stressed. He assumes that his nudge would resolve all her issues, but he learns from June that he just missed Sheila, who didn’t seem to be doing any better. She thanks June for the months of providing her service and mentions being tired by her insistent attempts. He goes to the bridge, where she is planning to commit suicide. 

  While he tries to save her from committing it, she can’t think of any reason to enter the next day. Even when she tries to make him go away, he stays with her and mentions how he will be there for the entire night if needed. He says that June helped him see the future, which is excellent and involves her, unlike what she assumes. He walks off the bridge when she asks for proof, confident she’ll follow him. And she does. They go on a walk yet again, but only this time do they enter the future together. 

Meet Cute | Official Trailer | Peacock Original

MEET CUTE (2022) LINKS : IMDB , ROTTENTOMATOES CAST : PETE DAVIDSON, KALEY CUOCO, DEBORAH S. CRAIG, KEVIN CORRIGAN, ROCK KOHLI

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Meet Cute Ending, Explained: Does Sheila Die?

Peacock’s ‘Meet Cute’ is a romantic comedy that follows the story of Sheila who has decided to keep reliving her first date with Gary. Using a time machine, she goes back into the past by twenty-four hours and lives a different version of the date each day. In the beginning, it looks like a very romantic thing for her, but soon, as the layers of her past and her motivation to be stuck on the same day are revealed, the darker side of Sheila’s story comes out. While it was clear from the beginning that something heartbreaking in her life had prevented her from moving on, the second half of the film sheds more light on her struggle. In the end, she has to make an important decision. Here’s what it means for her. SPOILERS AHEAD!

Meet Cute Plot Synopsis

At a bar, Sheila sets her eyes on Gary. She offers to buy him a drink and this slowly moves on to become a proper date. While Gary is intrigued by Sheila, he can’t help but notice some things about her that come across as weird. She knows what kind of drink he likes and sometimes, knows exactly what he is going to say. Sheila explains this away by telling Gary that she is a time traveler. Gary doesn’t take her seriously and at the end of the date, hopes that they’ll meet again. She assures him that she’ll see him tomorrow. While Gary walks away, not quite knowing what to make of her, Sheila stays true to her word, and the next day, in the same bar, on the same day, she meets Gary for the first time, all over again.

Meet Cute Ending: Does Sheila Die?

While in most time loop movies , a person is generally stuck in a place involuntarily and can’t wait to get out of there, in ‘Meet Cute’, Sheila chooses to stay in one day forever. What starts as a chance to experience something new, just once, turns into her spending the same day with Gary for weeks that turn into months. She spends so much time in the loop, that their anniversary arrives on the same day. But why does she do that? Why can’t she move beyond that day?

Over the course of their dates, Sheila tells Gary that before she got in the time machine and met him, she had decided to end her life. She entered the nail salon wanting to get her nails done, and then, had planned to jump off a bridge into the cold water to have, what she considered, an easier death. But the time machine offered her another chance. In her first loop, she ended up meeting Gary and had a great time with him. Because their first date was so good, Sheila believed that taking it forward would only ruin things for them. Her feelings about this were dictated by her past.

From all that happens in the film, it is clear that Sheila is suffering from depression. Things had always been a bit up and down for her. Her childhood was spent with a mother who didn’t pay her much attention, something that Gary discovers when he travels to Sheila’s past. Her father had been an alcoholic who died because of it, and this left a mark on her. It also turns out that she had been married for five years until her husband decided to call quits on their relationship, and they got divorced. The combined impact of all of these things, and more, took a toll on her, and she decided to end things.

It was when she met Gary that she found hope for herself. She had a great time with him and it was certainly the start of something good. However, because most of her relationships had fallen apart till now, she thought that something or the other in the future will lead Gary away from her. It could be his pregnant ex-girlfriend or someone nuking the city or simply the fact that Gary’s feelings might change in the future. Whatever it would be, Sheila decided it was better if she stayed in this one perfect day that she had with Gary rather than move forward and risk losing him completely. However, spending an entire year with him, stuck on the same day, eventually shows Sheila that for things to stay good, they need to change. She becomes so frustrated with the same routine and the fact that every night, Gary walks away when she talks about the dark things in her life that she decides it’s best if she sticks to her original plan and dies.

When she is finally about to go through with it, Gary shows up, asking her not to jump off the bridge. He pleads with her to give the next day a chance and see how things go from there. He tells her that he has seen the future (even though it’s more of a hope) and that no matter what she does, she’ll be in it. As he walks away, he says he’ll see her tomorrow, though he still remains uncertain. As the new day begins, Gary stops to look back and finds Sheila standing at a distance. It looks like he was right about the future after all. Sheila doesn’t jump off the bridge and decides to give the future another chance.

Do Sheila and Gary End up Together?

The whole point of repeating the same day over and over again was for Sheila to be with Gary. She was afraid of going into the next day because she feared that eventually her time with Gary will run its course and their relationship will end. But the fact that the relationship still runs its course, even when time doesn’t move forward, shows her that there is no point in living the same day over and over again. While for her, it has been more than a year since she started seeing Gary, for him, it’s barely been a night since he met her. This time difference creates a very unbalanced equation between them, which is what starts to create more problems than Sheila had imagined.

With every loop, Gary’s memories of the date with Sheila are wiped. He meets her for the first time, every single time, and yet, having spent more than a year with her, some things start to stick. He remembers little details about the things Sheila’d told him in previous loops. Not only this, but his feelings about her also start to settle in. On their last first date, he tells her that the entire date, he’s had mixed emotions about her. He feels like he’s having the best time of his life along with this unshakeable feeling that he resents her. Sheila doesn’t realize this, but Gary’s mixed feelings are the residual of their past interactions. Every time they meet for the first time is not as clean of a slate as Sheila believes it to be. Something from the past loops sticks and is carried forward.

In the end, Gary decides to look into the time machine and discovers that Sheila hadn’t been joking about it. He likes her but he doesn’t want to meet her for the first time again. He wants to move on to tomorrow, no matter what it looks like, so he decides to go back to her past and fix whatever issue caused her to have this bleak perception of life. Things don’t turn out as he’d intended, especially when he lands too far back in Sheila’s past and meets her young version, which cannot be reasoned with. He comes back believing he must have made a difference, but it turns out that he hasn’t.

He meets Sheila on the bridge where she is ready to jump. He convinces her to give another day a chance, and to his relief, she agrees to it. In the end, they walk into tomorrow, hand in hand, showing that they are ready to embrace things as they come. Life will still be a challenge and things might go wrong from time to time. But for now, they are ready to finally go on a second date and take things forward from there. Maybe they’ll stay together, maybe they won’t. In any case, they’ll take it one tomorrow at a time and not be stuck on the same day.

Read More: Best Time Loop Movies 

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Meet Cute reinvents time travel — and Pete Davidson’s persona

The time travel is thoughtful, and Davidson is tolerable.

Peacock’s latest original movie, Meet Cute, poses the question everyone from Ariana Grande and Kate Beckinsale to Kaia Gerber and Kim Kardashian may have asked themselves. If you could, would you go back in time and relive your happiest moment with Pete Davidson? For Kaley Cuoco’s neurotic New Yorker, the answer is definitely (and obsessively) in the affirmative.

The Big Bang Theory alum plays Sheila, a production assistant we first see chatting up Gary, Davidson’s graphic designer, at a crowded sports bar. He’s an unassuming twenty-something more interested in doodling on beermats than watching the soccer game gripping most other patrons. Initially, their conversation is stilted and awkward. “Thirsty? For a drink, not sexually,” she stutters. Still, Sheila knows that however labored her chatter is, she’s about to have the night of her life.

As she soon reveals, Sheila has experienced this exact evening before. While getting a salon manicure, she stumbled across a tanning bed that doubles as a time machine. And instead of using it to change the course of history, she repeatedly rewinds the clock by just 24 hours.

“I don’t have to be perfect... By the end of the night, we are always on cloud nine,” she reasons to Gary, who doesn’t believe a word but plays along anyway. “Do you know John Connor ?” becomes one of his regular questions.

Pete Davidson’s Gary and Kaley Cuoco’s Sheila on their first, or possibly their hundredth, date.

Proving herself a creature of habit, Sheila doesn’t even change their itinerary. The pair always head off to the same Indian restaurant, take the same boat ride to reminisce about random childhood memories, and enjoy the same hipster ice cream joint that soaks its milk in Fruity Pebbles. Their dates also always end on the same sour note: Gary making his escape after Sheila takes the time machine talk a little too far.

Sheila’s reluctance to move past the safety net of their first date proves Meet Cute isn’t your standard time-looping rom-com, a subgenre that’s enjoyed a renaissance thanks to streaming hits like Palm Springs , When We First Met, and The Map of Tiny Perfect Things . Director Alex Lehmann has quietly established himself as a leading figure of the post-mumblecore scene — see the monochromatic love story of Blue Jay , the poignant friendship tale of Paddleton, and recent intimate father-daughter two-hander Acidman — and his qualifications serve him well here.

It’s little surprise, therefore, that Lehmann’s fourth work of fiction (he also helmed the inspiring documentary Asperger’s Are Us and its TV spinoff) is largely free of groan-worthy contrivances and larger-than-life romantic gestures. Although the set-up is far more fantastical than his previous efforts, the drama that unfolds is still grounded in reality. Gary and Sheila interact like relatively normal humans, with the leads presumably given the go-ahead to improvise their way around Noga Pnueli’s astute script.

Gary laughs at his own Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation for the umpteenth time.

Davidson has certainly never been more charming away from the Saturday Night Live set. His previous starring vehicles, the self-indulgent The King of Staten Island and boorish coming-of-age Big Time Adolescence , did little but play upon his stoner man-child persona. But Davidson’s demeanor here sees him finally match the vulnerability of his famous puppy-dog eyes. You can perhaps understand why Sheila, and apparently the entire female population of Hollywood, are so smitten.

Cuoco has a much trickier role. Not only does she have to flutter her eyelashes enough to make her affections reciprocal, but she also has to sell Sheila’s cocktail of depression, childhood trauma, and bunny boiling mania while still remaining sympathetic. Luckily, Cuoco is up to the job, summoning the same frantic energy and comic timing that made The Flight Attendant one of last year’s must-watches. And there’s a streak of black humor that runs through Meet Cute , from the fact that Sheila must fatally run over her old self each time she restarts the day to her downright icky attempts at correcting the course of her date.

Gary finally gets to wear something other than a stripey sweater.

But as is often the case with time-jumping movies, Meet Cute loses its way a little when it tries expanding on its simple concept. Although initially content to laugh at the same Sophie’s Choice jokes and hear the same dead dad stories, Sheila eventually begins to question her self-enforced déjà vu (“Even a perfectly good steak starts to taste like sh*t when you eat it every day”). By the halfway point, Meet Cute is betraying its own rules, however arbitrary they may have seemed. And while this narrative shift takes Sheila’s meddling to insane heights (and gives the deadpan salon owner played by Deborah S. Craig, the only other cast member with more than a few lines, the chance to steal a scene), it ends up tying the film into frustrating knots.

Nevertheless, Meet Cute’s hangout vibes, naturalistic performances, and air of melancholy mean it still works as a rom-com for people that don’t normally like them. It also lives up to Lehmann’s acclamation of “the most honest tanning bed time-machine New York romantic comedy you’ll ever see.”

Meet Cute is streaming now on Peacock.

• Science Fiction

‘Meet Cute’: Kaley Cuoco uses time travel to woo Pete Davidson in smart rom-com

It’s an endearingly offbeat, magnetic pairing of the two tv stars on peacock..

Sheila (Kaley Cuoco) enjoys her introduction to Gary (Pete Davidson) so much, she travels back in time to repeat it in “Meet Cute.”

The Caught-in-a-Time-Loop premise has been implemented in romantic comedies such as “Groundhog Day” (1993) and “Palm Springs” (2020), the sci-fi actioner “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014), the horror film “Happy Death Day” (2017), the teen drama “Before I Fall” (2017), the Natasha Lyonne-starring “Russian Doll” series, etc., etc. It’s almost as if WE’RE caught in a time loop.

Here we go again with the Peacock movie “Meet Cute” — but the good news is that screenwriter Noga Pnueli, director Alex Lehmann and lead actors Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson have combined talents to deliver a smart, funny and at times truly poignant story.

Yes, “SNL” funnyman and serial dating legend Pete Davidson is the lead in a romantic comedy, and when we factor in Davidson’s performance in “The King of Staten Island” and “Bodies Bodies Bodies” along with his work here: Hey, this guy can act. (We’ve long known Kaley Cuoco is a kinetic force.)

“Meet Cute” opens with a close-up on Cuoco’s Sheila as she walks in Manhattan with Lauren Spencer-Smith’s version of the King-Goffin classic “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” on the soundtrack, offering an audio cue of the storyline to follow. Cut to a sports pub where Sheila works up the nerve to approach Davidson’s Gary, the only person in the bar not watching the action on TV. (“What do you have against televised sports, did a football kill your grandpa or something?” Sheila will later ask Gary.) They strike up an awkward, flirty conversation and then Sheila blurts out: “I’m a time traveler, from the future.”

Of course, Gary thinks Sheila is kidding, but he plays along with the gag as Sheila explains she’s from just 24 hours in the future. Thing is, Sheila is actually telling the truth, and she’s constantly reliving the night when she met Gary and the possibilities seemed endless. They meet in the bar. They go for a walk. They grab a bite at an Indian restaurant. More walking and talking. Ice cream. More walking and talking, more revelations about their respective lives. More talk from Sheila about being from the future.

Gary, as you’d expect, thinks Sheila is crazy — but he’s also drawn to her. And then the night ends, and they do it all over again, but then Sheila realizes she can go back a lot further than just one day and make some serious adjustments to Gary’s life in order to spare him lasting emotional trauma and improve his life. But this is the thing: Does Sheila have the RIGHT to try to alter Gary’s past without his knowledge? Isn’t it Gary’s pain to endure and overcome?

Cuoco and Davidson make for an endearingly offbeat, magnetic pairing; the two actors are up to the challenge of playing different shades within their respective characters. The thing about “Meet Cute” is the characters don’t really meet cute in the time-honored rom-com cliché manner — getting in a fender-bender, reaching for the same item in a department store, someone spilling coffee, etc. She just walks up to him in a bar. Three hundred times.

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Meet Cute review – charmless time travel romantic comedy

Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson can’t muster up enough chemistry for an increasingly annoying attempt to make an edgy romcom

M eet Cute, a grating Peacock romcom starring Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson, dives straight into a classic story: boy meets girl at a New York bar – or, more specifically, girl eyes boy intensely from one end of the bar, asks him for a drink and seems to know what he’ll say before he says it. Cuoco’s perky Sheila and Davidson’s Gary, diffident and a bit disheveled, exchange rhythmic banter. A couple of sarcastic, too-mannered barbs later, they’re off on a solid New York first date: dinner at East Village staple Panna II Garden, dessert at an ice cream truck, a ferry ride, thrift shopping, beers at a polka bar, nightcap walk along the East River.

Along the way, Sheila reveals the catch: their meet-cute seems to glide on air because they’ve practiced several times. She’s a time traveler from 24 hours in the future, running back the magic of their first date again and again. Sheila packages each info dump as flirty time-travel role play, a bit for the unwitting Gary to pitch back that quickly grows stale. As hard as Cuoco and Davidson try at chemistry – and Cuoco, at least, seems to be really trying – this umpteenth spin on the Groundhog Day time loop is more irksome than endearing, cutesy than actually cute, a downward spiral of uncomfortably performed neuroticism that devolves into a borderline indefensible ending. Palm Springs , this is not.

It does not help that the first third of the movie, written by Noga Pnueli and directed by Alex Lehmann, does little to alter the scope or stakes of Sheila and Gary’s repetitive date. Sheila, who we learn was suicidal until she found the time machine (telegraphed by smudged eyeliner, of course, and her proclamation that she wants to kill herself) goes back in time via a tanning bed at a nondescript nail salon run by deadpan manicurist June (Deborah S Craig.) She runs her old self over with a car. She goes to Gary’s bar in the same yellow gingham dress, differentiated by slight hairstyle changes. (This is clearly a Covid-era movie, with few costume changes, two main indoor sets, and many scenes set outside.) She unsuccessfully tries to explain the loop to Gary without freaking him out, which is the natural reaction to someone endlessly running back a first date because “you’re the only person to make me truly happy ever”.

Cuoco and Davidson, delivering his best aw-shucks shrugs, are not bad actors; they build up a small reservoir of affection over the first half of this 80-minute film. But that’s squandered in the latter half by Sheila’s increasingly irredeemable behavior and the film’s handling of her mental health crisis. More specifically, Sheila, whom Cuoco overplays with wide-eyed, manic energy, begins messing with Gary’s childhood to optimize his adult self. Worse, as Gary begins to subconsciously catch on to Sheila’s desperate and futile attempts to freeze time, Meet Cute doubles down on her gestures toward suicide; I watched with gritted teeth as the final act presented the romcom stakes as reconciliation with Gary or jumping off a bridge. It’s insensitive at best, a cheap attempt at character depth.

There’s an intriguing thread somewhere in here about unrequited obsession that has more do to with insecurities than actual love, about how depression can lead to intense, sticky fixations that are difficult to surrender. This is not a smart enough film to do that, nor one as edgy as it seems to think it is. It’s competently directed – New York feels like New York, gritty and infinitely open. The lines must’ve worked on the page, and sometimes echo real flirtation. But well-timed rapport is not a substitute for charm, nor enough to justify this empty loop.

Meet Cute is now available on Peacock with a UK date to be announced

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Peacock's Meet Cute Review: Kaley Cuoco And Pete Davidson's Fun Rom-Com Will Keep Viewers Thinking

An age-old story of love, time travel, and tanning booths..

At first glance, Peacock’s quirky new romantic comedy Meet Cute is an instant magnet for cinematic comparisons. There are obvious Groundhog Day vibes, with clear nods to Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore ’s 50 First Dates chemistry, as viewed through a Palm Springs -esque prism. But such comparisons just distract from everything that makes the movie stand apart from those and other rom-coms and time-manipulating movies: a tight, streamlined script and another attention-grabbing performance from The Big Bang Theory vet and The Flight Attendant star Kaley Cuoco. 

Meet Cute marks the most high-profile project yet for both its writer, Noga Pneuli, and its director, Alex Lehmann, with the latter having helmed two Mark Duplass -starring dramas in recent years. This is not only because the film is being granted a massive potential audience through its Peacock release, but also because it stars two major Hollywood headliners in Cuoco and now-former Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson. It’s great that the two talents are so naturally genial and easy to watch, since they have to carry the entire movie, with a select few co-stars sporting notable speaking roles otherwise. 

Kaley Cuoco stars as Sheila, a newly hopeful romantic who shares a truly magical night with Pete Davidson ’s bar-visiting everyman Gary, who is under the impression that he’s totally nailing it with their connection. But what viewers soon discover — via a plot point already made very obvious by the film’s trailer and plotline — Sheila gained access to a time machine that allows her to continuously relive their joy-filled date ad nauseum. Her best-laid plans go awry, however, as she grows weary of her looping habits and sets her sights on using the time machine to “fix” Gary, which is where Meet Cute ’s underlying character beats come to a head. It shouldn’t take a film buff to figure out such motives and actions aren’t guaranteed paths to happiness, even if it keeps audiences mostly smiling throughout. 

Meet Cute’s time travel rules are smart and not overly complicated.

A time-travel project’s worst enemy can often be its own rule set, especially in cases where more attention is placed on plotting than character. But in the vein of Hot Tub Time Machine , Meet Cute ’s sci-fi device is an otherwise normal looking tanning bed, which Sheila learns about thanks to a nail salon manager played by Deborah S. Craig, who would have easily commanded more screen-time in a slightly longer movie. (The Peacock flick clocks in at just under 90 minutes, including end credits.)

We won’t get into Meet Cute ’s time-travel tricks here, as not to get bogged down with spoilery elements, but suffice to say, the creative team made a point of keeping that part of the story relatively easy to understand and follow along with. So anyone who balks at this brand of storytelling needn’t worry about falling behind. At the same time, though, the sci-fi sub-genre’s inherent complexities do absolutely allow for obsession-driven trains of thought, with Primer never far from the brain. So if you are into timey-wimey shenanigans, Meet Cute will stick with you for a while after watching. 

Kaley Cuoco continues showing off her acting range, while Pete Davidson…is Pete Davdison.

In many ways, the movie would be just as effective as a stage play, given Sheila and Gary’s slightly unhinged tale never strays from the two superstars leading things. In that respect, Kaley Cuoco delivers another fantastic performance all around, even if it doesn’t feel entirely dissimilar from her role of Cassie Bowden in HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant . Not just by way of alcohol-fueled sequences, but through a character whose personality and emotional history isn’t necessarily what one might expect from the bubbly, love-stricken Cuoco seen in the film’s promo materials. Thankfully, she’s perfectly fit to handle the performance gamut with ease.

On the other side of that coin is Pete Davidson, whose performance is about what one would expect with a character who spends a lot of the movie wearing a shirt with his name on it. To be sure, Davidson is enjoyable throughout the film, as his low-key energy fits squarely into Gary’s vibe, and he taps into other zones of acting in key moments when it’s needed. By and large, though, Gary fits right at home with many other roles the New York native has delivered over the years. Pete gonna Pete.

The writing is where the film suffers the most.

Meet Cute ’s time travel zaniness and the two leads’ performances are easily championable on any level, and director Alex Lehmann manages to keep things visually interesting throughout, despite the film's intentionally repetitious nature. Where the movie jukes and jives quality-wise is in its script. Perhaps it’s not a big surprise, given the genre quirks, but certain scenes feel too heavily crafted, whether it’s Sheila mirroring Gary’s dialogue as he’s saying it, or slightly out of place emotional beats. One could argue that Sheila’s questionable actions justify some of it, but not so much for other moments, especially when jokes thud the hardest. 

Another somewhat noteworthy issue involves a spoilery plot point regarding Sheila. While I won’t get into details here, Meet Cute deals with some triggering elements that some viewers may not feel are handled with the right amount of sensitivity, in part due to the heavily comedic tone, and in part because of the breezy runtime. The general message of it all is indeed meaningful if you want it to be, but one’s mileage will vary. While I wasn’t so personally bothered in those regards, I certainly can’t speak for everyone.

As a time-travel movie duo, Sheila and Gary aren’t history-changers like Bill and Ted, and they don’t get involved in gross familial circumstances like Doc and Marty. But their story is definitely another unique entry in the annals of cinema, and one that fans may want to watch time and time again, with or without a time travel tanning booth involved.

Nick is a Cajun Country native and an Assistant Managing Editor with a focus on TV and features. His humble origin story with CinemaBlend began all the way back in the pre-streaming era, circa 2009, as a freelancing DVD reviewer and TV recapper.  Nick leapfrogged over to the small screen to cover more and more television news and interviews, eventually taking over the section for the current era and covering topics like Yellowstone, The Walking Dead and horror. Born in Louisiana and currently living in Texas — Who Dat Nation over America’s Team all day, all night — Nick spent several years in the hospitality industry, and also worked as a 911 operator. If you ever happened to hear his music or read his comics/short stories, you have his sympathy.

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Film Review: Meet Cute ; a time travel comedy you’ll want to go back and warn yourself from watching

• November 25, 2022
• Film & TV
• TV & Streaming
• Kaley Cuoco
• pete davidson
• Prime Video

Live. Date. Repeat.

The ideal first date and that titular mentality that so many romantic comedies bank on is a concept that, in real life, we wish could be so cinematically charming.  And the idea that a film would take such a concept and build a time travel-influenced narrative around it sounds incredibly promising.  What a shame we can’t time travel back and warn ourselves from 90 minutes prior to not waste time on Alex Lehmann ‘s premise-squandering effort.

Meet Cute doesn’t exactly detail the first date of motor-mouth Sheila ( Kaley Cuoco ) and the more casual Gary (a charming Pete Davidson ).  No, when the film opens and we see the two flirting easily at the bar and swanning off for dinner, we come to learn that their actions – her approaching him at the bar, him dropping the lightly amusing line of having a “Sophie’s choice” when it comes to dinner options – have long been played out before, because, wouldn’t you know it, Sheila has stumbled upon a time machine and has been using its abilities – which seemingly can only take her back 24 hours in the past – to re-visit her date with Gary in an effort to get it perfect.

Of course, perfect is relative, and every single date (which is always just the first for Gary in his timeline) ends differently; predominantly with Gary leaving in a degree of anger over Sheila’s desperation to make their courtship work.  And therein lies one of the main problems with Meet Cute as a film, because, as charming as Gary seems to be, we’re never entirely sure why it’s specifically him and just that first date that Sheila so desperately wants to re-visit.  Noga Pneuli ‘s script lays heavily on the drama side of things in making Sheila depressed and, evidently, suicidal, and there could be plenty said of the film leaning into a type of saviour complex in Gary, but everything feels so surface level that our emotional input is never earned.

It also doesn’t help that for a so called “romantic comedy” it never feels either romantic nor comedic.  There’s decent chemistry between Cuoco and Davidson, but you can’t help but wonder why Sheila’s going to so much effort for this guy.  He’s likeable, sure, but is he travel-back-in-time-for likeable? That’s heavily debatable.  It’s also to the film’s detriment that Sheila is a particularly challenging character.  She’s definitely written in a “too much” type of manner – manic, pushy, electric – and I don’t know if any actress could have made her entirely agreeable, but Cuoco does what she can with it.  The actress is capable of making live-wire characters very much her own – see both seasons of The Flight Attendant for proof – and though Meet Cute doesn’t always serve her, it’s at least exciting to see her embrace wilder roles that aren’t carbon copies of her Big Bang persona.

As to be expected with a movie dealing with time travel, the idea of altering someone’s personality to hopefully suit your ideals and the butterfly effect that comes from such is lightly explored, but Pneuli never feels as if she entirely has a handle on any of her narrative strands to follow through on this being anything more than a light note in an overall story that feels more like an elevator pitch than a detailed story.  Romantic comedies dealing with various forms of time manipulation have worked in the past – Groundhog Day , About Time , and Sliding Doors , for example – and the pitch here should’ve been an entirely easy sell, but conflicting genre tones, characters we never entirely understand, and a “message” that feels drastically hollow result in this meet cute being anything but.

TWO STARS (OUT OF FIVE)

Meet Cute is now streaming on Prime Video .

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Meet Cute: release date, trailer and everything we know about the new romantic comedy

Is it considered love at first sight if you keep traveling back in time to relive those first moments?

Love is in the air with the movie Meet Cute . Starring Saturday Night Live alum Pete Davidson and The Flight Attendant star Kaley Cuoco, the movie takes viewers on a journey of romance that involves some endearing banter, a number of laughs and the occasional moments of time travel. Yes, we said time travel. 

Cuoco’s character Sheila is on a mission to continue relieving the first moments that she met the love of her life. Unfortunately, the more she travels back in time to meet Davidson’s character Gary, the more she realizes he’s flawed by past experiences. Seeking to make him perfect, she attempts to go back in time to prevent those experiences from happening. However, as with every show or movie that deals with time travel, messing with elements in the past always has unintended consequences. 

Here’s everything we know about Meet Cute . 

When is the Meet Cute release date? 

Meet Cute premieres in the US on Wednesday, September 21, on Peacock . Those interested in watching the film when it debuts need at least a Peacock Premium subscription, which can be obtained with a few clicks of a mouse. 

We expect the film to become available in the UK also via Peacock. The streaming service can be accessed via Sky TV or NOW subscriptions. 

What is Meet Cute about? 

Peacock describes the Meet Cute plot as the following: 

"When Sheila and Gary meet, it’s love at first sight — until we realize their magical date wasn’t fate at all. Sheila’s got a time machine and they've been falling in love over and over again. But when the perfect night is never quite enough, Sheila travels to Gary’s past to change him into the perfect man."

Who is in the Meet Cute cast?

Meet Cute stars Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson. Cuoco was recently spotted in the Netflix film The Man from Toronto and she received a 2022 Emmy nomination for her portrayal of Cassie Bowden in The Flight Attendant . We also can't ignore her years of playing Penny Hofstadter in the hit series The Big Bang Theory . 

Davidson on the other hand spent many years as a member of the SNL cast. He’s also been featured as Scott Carlin in The King of Staten Island and Blackguard in The Suicide Squad . He’s also made a cameo or two in The Kardashians .  

You can check out the full list of the Meet Cute cast over on IMDb .  

Meet Cute trailer

Judging by the trailer, Cuoco’s Sheila may be straddling the line between romantic and stalkerish behavior. Take a look and you be the judge. 

Meet Cute director

Alex Lehmann directed Meet Cute . He’s previously directed the films Blue Jay , Acidman , Paddleton and the documentary Asperger's Are Us .

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Terrell Smith has a diverse writing background having penned material for a wide array of clients including the federal government and Bravo television personalities.  When he’s not writing as Terrell, he’s writing under his pseudonym Tavion Scott, creating scripts for his audio drama podcasts. Terrell is a huge fan of great storytelling when it comes to television and film. Some of his favorite shows include  The Crown ,  WandaVision , Abbot Elementary   and  Godfather of Harlem .  And a fun fact is he's completely dialed into the TLC  90 Day Fiancé  universe. 

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‘Meet Cute’ Review: Live. Date. Repeat.

This time-loop rom-com takes another swing at the tried-and-true “Groundhog Day” premise.

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By Calum Marsh

“Meet Cute,” from the director Alex Lehmann, is a “Groundhog Day” movie. Dozens of movies have borrowed the premise of the 1993 comedy in which Bill Murray finds himself caught in a 24-hour time loop, forced to continuously relive the same day: it’s been applied to sci-fi ( “Source Code” ), farce ( “Naked” ), horror ( “Happy Death Day” ), and blockbuster action ( “Edge of Tomorrow” ), often to amusing effect. “Meet Cute,” like the 2020 film “Palm Springs,” brings the concept to bear on the rom-com: Sheila (Kaley Cuoco) is stuck on a time-looped first date with Gary (Pete Davidson), repeatedly meeting and re-meeting the guy she’s convinced is the man of her dreams.

Part of the appeal of “Groundhog Day” (and many of its imitators) is that the reason for the time loop is never explained: Murray’s Sisyphean plight rang true without the need for some literal justification. “Meet Cute” complicates its conceit by introducing elaborate plot mechanics involving a tanning-bed time machine, which results in a number of boring expository flashbacks and, later, an extended riff on “The Butterfly Effect.”

Of course, these logistical problems would be excusable if the romance at the center of the movie were remotely compelling or if the jokes were actually funny. At one point, the couple dines at a fancy modern restaurant, and there’s an extended gag about the tiny portions. (“Are we supposed to eat this?” Sheila asks, aghast. “Yes,” Gary says. “It’s one of the best restaurants in the city!”) That joke, like the premise of the movie, might have seemed fresh 30 years ago. Are we stuck in a time loop?

Meet Cute Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Peacock .

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What would you do if you could travel to your loved ones' past, heal their traumas, fix their problems, and change them into the perfect partner? What would you do if you could travel to your loved ones' past, heal their traumas, fix their problems, and change them into the perfect partner? What would you do if you could travel to your loved ones' past, heal their traumas, fix their problems, and change them into the perfect partner?

• Alex Lehmann
• Noga Pnueli
• Kaley Cuoco
• Pete Davidson
• Kevin Corrigan
• 147 User reviews
• 30 Critic reviews
• 50 Metascore
• 1 nomination

• Phil the Bartender

• Young Sheila

• Soccer Announcer
• Beer Garden Patron
• (uncredited)

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Did you know

• Trivia The character of Gary played by Pete Davidson was written for Johnny Galecki

Sheila : It's okay for things to be messy sometimes.

• Crazy credits There are almost 5 minutes of outtakes that start after the static end-credits and before the scrolling end-credits.
• Connections References The Terminator (1984)
• Soundtracks Will You Love Me Tomorrow Written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin Performed by Lauren Spencer-Smith Courtesy of Three Name Productions Inc. Under exclusive license to Island Records & Republic Records, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc.

User reviews 147

• kieranljones
• Dec 7, 2022
• How long is Meet Cute? Powered by Alexa
• September 21, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Sevimli Rastlaşma
• Orogen Entertainment
• Anamorphic Media
• Convergent Media.
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 29 minutes

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What Time Does ‘Meet Cute’ Premiere on Peacock? How To Watch Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson’s Rom-Com

Where to stream:.

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Is amazon leaving boffo box office on the table by sending 'road house' straight to streaming, 'the flight attendant' canceled by max after 2 seasons, stream it or skip it: ‘role play’ on amazon prime video, an action-comedy starring david oyelowo and kaley cuoco.

Meet Cute , Peacock ‘s new romantic comedy, is putting a creative new spin on time travel. Instead of a typical time machine, our protagonist Sheila (Kaley Cuoco) takes trips to the past with help from a tanning bed in the back room of a nail salon.

Written by Noga Pnueli and directed by Alex Lehmann, the rom-com kicks off with Sheila introducing herself to Gary (Pete Davidson), a shy guy sitting alone at a bar. After their successful meet-cute, the two have a near-perfect first date, and all seems right in their world. The only problem? It wasn’t actually their first date. Turns out Sheila’s had a lot of practice flirting with Gary, because she keeps traveling back in time to relive their special night together.

Desperate to find out how this messy love story unfolds? Understandable. Wondering what time  Meet Cute will be on Peacock? How can you watch Pete Davidson’s Meet Cute online? And if Meet Cute will be on Netflix, Hulu, or in theaters? Here’s everything you need to know on how to watch the Peacock original film.

When Does Meet Cute Premiere On Peacock? Meet Cute Peacock Release Date:

Meet Cute will begin streaming on Peacock on Wednesday, September 21.

What Time Will Meet Cute Be on Peacock?

A Peacock PR rep confirmed to Decider that the time travel adventure will launch on the platform September 21 at 6:00 a.m. EST or 3:00 a.m. PST.

Will  Meet Cute Be On Netflix or Hulu? Is Pete Davidson’s Meet Cute Playing in Theaters?

Sadly, no. Because  Meet Cute is a Peacock original movie it is streaming exclusively on the platform. The film won’t be available to watch on other streamers like Netflix or Hulu, and since it’s going straight to Peacock it’s not getting a theatrical release either.

How Can You Watch Meet Cute Online:

To watch this Peacock original movie you’ll need a Peacock account . Normally, a Peacock Premium plan costs $4.99 a month, but the platform is running a special limited time offer that allows subscribers to save 60%. The offer, which runs until September 30, 2022, allows people to pay $1.99 per month (for 12 months) or $19.99 per year for a Premium plan . With Peacock Premium you’ll have access to Peacock originals, live sports and events, and 80,000+ hours of entertainment. You can also opt for a a Premium Plus account, which give you access to everything Premium members get without ads. You’ll also have the ability to download select titles and watch them offline. A Premium Plus Peacock plan costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year.

Once you have your Peacock account, set up simply visit the website or download the Peacock app on one of these compatible devices and start streaming Meet Cute .

• Peacock Premium

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‘Nostalgia for a Dating Experience They’ve Never Had’

Young people are tired of swiping. Now they want serendipity.

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Say you’re in a bar. You see someone across the room who looks appealing. But do they think the same of you? You don’t want to stare for too long, so you turn back to your drink. No worries—the electronic tentacles attached to your shoulders give a wiggle, indicating that the hottie, mercifully, has glanced your way.

That’s the premise of a device called “ Ripple ,” named, I guess, for the undulating sensation triggered by a stranger’s horny gaze. Equipped with two cameras, it connects computer-vision technology with sensors to detect when someone is looking at you. (Unfortunately, it can’t really distinguish between the eyes of an admirer and someone noticing you because you’re wearing tentacles out to the bar.) Ripple’s creators pitched it as a way to help people meet in person—the old-fashioned way, with, um, one minor difference.

It was developed in 2017—five years after Tinder and Hinge launched, when people were getting nervous about the effects of dating apps. They’d created a society-wide experiment: “What if we stopped dating people we meet in our regular lives and started building some other system, where major corporations use algorithms to figure out how we meet?” Eli Finkel, who studies romantic relationships at Northwestern University, told me. What would it mean for technology to mediate romantic connection? Would it make us all irreparably incapable of courting on our own?

Read: The rise of dating-app fatigue

Ripple never got big, but it was only the most memeworthy in a long line of similar offerings made for people both sick of and dependent on dating apps. There’s the “ pear ring ,” designed to be worn by mingling singles to signal their eligibility. Or speed-dating events, an old concept that’s become newly popular . Some dating apps are, paradoxically, designed to combat your dating-app fatigue . Take Thursday, which unlocks swiping for one day a week—and then holds a real-life soiree for people to meet. Or Strike, which notifies you when someone you’ve matched with is nearby. Or Happn, which shows you users you’ve physically crossed paths with, and promises to “use technology to improve real life, not to replace it.”

If “real life” means finding love face-to-face, rather than through a screen, you can’t blame people for wanting to return to it—especially considering how many shows and movies involve soulmates connecting via fluke run-ins , reaching for the same pair of gloves or physically running into each other on the sidewalk. More than a decade after the dawn of dating apps, we’re seeing the emergence of a strain of meet-cute nostalgia. Perhaps more than ever, singles today idealize romance that doesn’t involve the internet—the kind that’s physical and visceral, and that finds you.

But people aren’t so used to waiting around for love to find them anymore, and they seem less willing to risk rejection by putting themselves out there in person. And anyway, the utopia of serendipitous encounters exists only in our imagination. Meet-cutes won’t fix modern dating.

For much of human history, single people couldn’t usually just decide to go on a date. Before the Industrial Revolution, your family or another trusted community member would likely set you up with the person you’d marry. Later, people commonly met through their social circles or at places of worship, school, or eventually work; you could try to be flirty and open to connection, or put yourself in situations to meet new people, but you could only control so much. You were under the heel of fate.

Dating apps radically upended that powerlessness. They created a practical kind of agency—the ability to “go out and make it happen,” Paul Eastwick, a UC Davis psychologist, told me. They also created another issue entirely: the burnout that comes from sorting through a deluge of options, many of them far from ideal. Still, that’s arguably preferable to having no options at all—which could happen pretty quickly if you’d exhausted your pool of friends-of-friends (and you weren’t going around spilling orange juice on charming strangers). “Yes, it’s a bummer, even today, to not have found somebody after working at it,” Finkel said. “But it’s certainly nice to know that those 100 dates were available, even though they weren’t great.” And online dating has led to a ton of successful relationships. In fact, it’s the most common way that American couples now meet. The people complaining about apps, Finkel said, “don’t know what it was like to be single in 1980.”

That’s just it—many of them literally don’t. Plenty of young people dating today have never done so offline. They’re used to having the agency that was so novel when apps first emerged. Now some of them, tired of the responsibility that comes with being in the driver’s seat, want to let go of the wheel. What they covet is just the opposite of pragmatic efficiency: serendipity.

Read: America is sick of swiping

Media outlets have proclaimed for a while now that young people are turning away from online dating —but it’s unclear to what degree that’s actually happening. One commonly cited study found that 79 percent of college students don’t use dating apps regularly. That makes sense, though: College students are meeting people on campus. Whether or not the apps are dying, they’re not dead yet—and definitely not for young people. In 2023, 60 percent of Tinder’s 75 million monthly active users were younger than 35.

But that doesn’t mean they’re enjoying it. In one 2022 survey , nearly 80 percent of 18-to-54-year-old respondents reported feeling emotional burnout or fatigue when online dating. Liesel Sharabi, a communications professor at Arizona State University, has found that meeting on an app still carries some stigma, despite how common it is. “I think people like the idea of having that love story to tell,” she told me. Perhaps young daters especially. They seem to be romantics: A 2024 Hinge report found that Gen Z participants were 30 percent more likely than Millennials to believe each person has one soulmate and 39 percent more likely to consider themselves romantically idealistic. For them, Sharabi told me, the old meet-cute ideal is particularly intriguing: “It’s almost like nostalgia for a dating experience that they’ve never had.”

It might also be harder for them to get that experience if they want it. Young Americans are hanging out less on average, so they have fewer opportunities to chat someone up in a social setting. And less practice might mean doing so feels more intimidating. Sharabi recalled one Gen Z research participant saying they probably would never approach someone intriguing at a party; instead, they told her, “I might see if they’re online.” Of course, if you slide into someone’s DMs or find them on an app, you could still get snubbed. But a nonresponse is harder to interpret than a verbal “no thank you” in a way that can be comforting: Perhaps the other person didn’t see the message, or they got too busy to respond. Even a clear “no” stings less through the distance afforded by a screen. The Hinge survey found that Gen Z daters fear rejection “most acutely”: More than half of them said that concern has kept them from pursuing a possible relationship, and they’re 10 percent more likely than Millennial respondents to say they’ve missed out on a romantic opportunity because of it.

That helps explain the meet-cute-nostalgia industry offering to make in-person encounters easier. Yet most of those efforts, frankly, are flops—ineffective, impractical, even bizarre ways to force romance to unfold in a manner that isn’t natural to modern courtship. Happn, designed for finding “your crush in the places you love,” presented me with a bevy of people who lived around me—which is pretty much what every other dating app does. It kept proclaiming that a user “lives in New York City too,” as if that was a profound, romantic coincidence. The app Strike hypothetically lets you buy a “wearable” (a little rectangular device that fits in your pocket) to notify you when a match is nearby—in real time, so you can actually approach them—but I couldn’t set up an account, nor could I reach anyone at the company to help me. The major online-dating companies are trying to join the trend too; Hinge is offering tens of thousands of dollars in grants to any organization that can help “Gen Z find belonging and community in person,” and Bumble is hosting “IRL” dating events . But when I searched for one in New York—the Big Apple!—I was told, “No results match your search.” I would have tried speed-dating, but I couldn’t swallow paying $30 just to sit through two hours of awkward conversations. (I would, however, be willing to bet $30 that I’ll never see anyone wearing a pear ring.)

On TikTok, real-life-chat gurus promise lessons like teaching “the most natural, non-awkward way to approach that cute stranger .” (The channel “ How to Talk to Strangers ” had 61.6 million views at the time of my writing this.) Common advice is to ask for directions, make eye contact , give a compliment , or pose a specific question —like what someone’s favorite nearby coffee shop is. But it seemed to me that this might have a higher success rate for a notably hot person than for most everyone else. “It literally doesn’t matter what you look like” as long as you’re confident, one TikToker proclaimed before adding, “I mean, obviously you have to look, like, somewhat pretty.” Eastwick also pointed out that this brand of how-to romantic instruction is “tailored to pick up certain kinds of people attending certain kinds of establishments at a particular period of time.” It might have worked for someone else, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work for you.

People aren’t wrong to crave in-person connection. The shortcomings of dating apps have been, at this point, well covered: They can encourage shallowness, for one thing. They’re rife with harassment, for another. And they often set you up with people whom you share no context with beyond geographical proximity. Sharabi has found that on average, relationships that start on dating apps are slightly less stable than those that begin in person, and partners are slightly less satisfied. Her explanation: “You’re meeting people who you have no prior connection with. That can have long-term effects when you try to integrate them into your network.” That is to say, you’re dating strangers.

The solution to those problems is probably not finding strangers to date in person rather than online. Doing so would still mean going for someone who remains mostly mysterious except for their appearance, and you still might not share anything beyond proximity. Besides, random meet-cutes were never the “natural” way to find a partner, or even the most common way. Before apps, most couples met through friends or family. When Eastwick hears that people feel guilty for not wanting to chat someone up in public, he tells them: “That’s okay. That’s a skill that you can learn if you want, but it’s really not central to the way that we meet each other.” On the phone with me, he laughed about the idea of, say, striking up conversation with a lone bombshell at the end of the bar. “Is this bar in an airport? Like, where is this happening? This is very odd to me.”

Read: The golden age of dating doesn’t exist

Now the airport-bar kind of encounter is probably even less likely to happen than in the past—not just because dating apps have made people unaccustomed to taking romantic risks, but also because they’ve (fortunately) let us prioritize consent, at least in the realm of early propositions. Society has largely become more attuned to the discomfort that unwanted advances can cause, Finkel told me. The notion of a loose, spontaneous culture of in-person flirting sounds nice—except that it would entail some interactions you never wanted.

Of course, it is possible to approach a stranger of interest respectfully. Several dating coaches told me they work with clients who are hungry for real-life romance to teach them how to do so. Jayda Shuavarnnasri, a sex and relationship educator, suggests that people always give the other person an out—for instance: “If you want to sit in silence to eat your meal, please let me know.” It’s tricky, though, because some people will have a harder time landing all of this smoothly, not necessarily because they’re pushier but because they struggle more with social cues. “Is it okay with us if a guy who’s kind of on the autism spectrum” gets called out for hitting on someone, Finkel asked me, “but people who are Brad Pitt don’t get sanctioned for the same behavior?”

None of this means that you should never talk to strangers. It just means that doing so is a delicate way to find love, and it’s certainly not the only way that can lead to something genuine. We shouldn’t put it on a pedestal—especially if we’re not ready to accept what it would really mean for society to embrace it. If you do want to seek connection with the people you see out and about, Shuavarnnasri advised taking some pressure off by not expecting the interaction to be necessarily romantic. Maybe you’ll have a pleasant conversation and then never see each other again. But you’ll still have opened yourself up to a bit of playful uncertainty—the kind that comes when you have no agenda and no idea how things might play out.

Meet-cute nostalgia raises the question of how much ambiguity we can tolerate—whether a serendipitous spark with a stranger is worth the potential for awkwardness and misinterpretation, or whether boundaries and clarity are worth some lost opportunities for connection. “Do we want a society where there’s an excess number of people being hit on and having to say no … or do we want a society where there’s an excess amount of people not initiating relationships that would have been desirable?” Finkel asked. We can’t have it both ways—not perfectly.

Either way, mystery and doubt will always be part of romance. You could follow a TikToker’s advice to a T, march proudly into a café, and ask the person next to you about their oatmeal—just to get a short response and a turn away. You could also get ghosted by someone whose app profile says they’re looking for a life partner. In love, however you meet, you’re always risking something—and even a set of fancy flirting tentacles can’t change that.