‘Starstruck’ S3 review: Rose Matafeo takes her rom-com for a victory lap

Should you ever get back together with an ex? It’s a complicated question when you’ve shared a powerful bond with someone, celebrated birthdays, movie premieres, life wins, life fails, arguments, and now it’s over. But you’re fine! And then you run into each other after years and…oh dear. It’s a question that underscores the third season of New Zealand comedian Rose Matafeo’s joyous millennial rom-com series, Starstruck.

Created by and starring Matafeo, alongside fellow comedian Alice Snedden, BBC/HBO’s Starstruck is three seasons in and well-settled in its incisive examination of life’s sweet messiness, the gloriously awkward clusterfuck of falling for someone, the heartbreak of things falling apart, and that all-too-relatable feeling that everyone around you has their shit more together than you ever will.

Season 1 leaned into the temperamental chaos of something new, introducing Jessie (Matafeo) and Tom’s (Nikesh Patel) burgeoning Notting Hill situation and dealing with Tom’s fame, while Season 2 asked “what next?” after Jessie’s grand romantic gesture, moving them into early dating territory. Season 3? Hard ex-ville.

Starstruck takes Jessie and Tom into ex-ville

Mirroring the bookended Season 1 and 2, Starstruck’s third season picks up right where we left off: Jessie’s big romantic Notebook-style gesture, wading into the pond to smooch her ex Tom during Ian’s bachelor party. Unexpectedly in Season 3, however, the long will-they-won’t-they romance between Tom and Jessie, one we’ve followed for two seasons, runs its entire course in an instant. Opening the show, a gorgeous, heartbreaking two-minute montage takes us through the whole thing, then starts the real events of the season two years later.

It’s essentially Lorde’s “Supercut” and it threw me into a spin.

Uh…. heyyyyyyyyyyy! 🫣😬
Credit: BBC/Avalon UK

Having jumped forward in time (the same amount of time it’s been IRL since Season 1 was released), Season 3 moves closer and closer to Tom’s wedding day (noooo!), as well as Jessie’s greatest friend Kate’s (perpetual standout and Stath Lets Flats star Emma Sidi) delivery date, through mishaps and confusion, friendship fallouts, average dates, above average dates, major life decisions, minor life decisions. Through it all, Tom and Jessie are still navigating their lasting feelings for each other and dabbling in some high risk “bad idea right?” realms, while their affections are growing with their new partners, Clem (Constance Labbé) and Liam (Vigil star Lorne MacFadyen).

Unlike the will-they-won’t-they set-up of Season 2, the show moves Jessie and Tom into a future possibly without each other as partners, which conjures some of Matafeo’s greatest work — no one sells “I’m fine. I’m so, so, fine. I’m fiiiine…Wow, I’m actually fine? Huh. Sweet.” like this. And as Jessie and Tom figure it all out, the series’ writing is as relatable and essentially human as ever. As Mashable’s Anna Iovine writes, “Yearning for a previous, comfortable relationship may arise when you start meeting other people. The dating waters can be inhospitable, to say the least, and they may cause you to wonder if your previous relationship was that bad.”

I have a sneaking suspicion Starstruck Season 3 will divide longtime viewers somewhat, as we’ve become so invested in Jessie and Tom as the pinnacle of the show’s depiction of ultimate romance, with not one but two happy endings closing Seasons 1 and 2. But this season, Starstruck will make you question the soulmate trope in rom-coms, that there’s only one person allowed in our heroine’s story, and that all things must resolve the way they always do. 

Credit: BBC/Avalon UK

Season 3 connects with the pressure of feeling less “further along in life”

One of the key themes throughout Season 3 is all too relatable for folks like me in their mid-30s — the part where everyone in your life starts buying houses, getting married, having kids. Starstruck acknowledges this early in the series, through Jessie’s greatest friend Kate, who tells her earnestly, “Just because everyone else is getting engaged and getting married and moving on to the next stage of their lives it doesn’t mean that you should feel like a failure in any way.”

But it’s not that easy to avoid thinking about. What Starstruck does is allow its protagonist to feel all that pressure, then reminds the audience and Jessie that in the end, most of us are actually doing alright. In a truly season-stealing moment from Jessie’s blunt family friend Amelia (played by co-writer Snedden) at a less-than-well-attended birthday, Jessie gets a brutal reality check I felt injected into my veins through the screen:

“You’ve got to get a grip and stop being a little bitch. I’m sorry but your life’s actually not that bad. It’s going OK. You’ve got a house, a job. You look fine, no one’s going to stare. You’re not even that bad of a person. Just appreciate what you have while you have it.”

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

This scene ended me: ‘Starstruck’ co-writers Alice Snedden and Rose Matafeo.
Credit: BBC/Avalon UK

Starstruck Season 3 gives its characters room to mess up and make up

Like fellow kick-ass women-led British series like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Aisling Bea’s This Way Up, or Billie Piper and Lucy Prebble’s I Hate Suzie, Matafeo’s Starstruck has always and continues to let her protagonist royally screw up, then either own it or fix it. Every last one of us is capable of making mistakes, hurting the people we love, being a royal asshole to our mates, just as Jessie does in Season 3. Amid the infuriating tension and high-pitched “fineness” of having to be a grown-up in the presence of an ex, Jessie is allowed to completely bork things up, all while she remains practical and sanguine. Two things can be true at once.

By Season 3, Matafeo and Sneddon have created a living, breathing world for the characters to explore the pure awkwardness of dating, love, and friendships through everyday life, armed with Starstruck‘s superb supporting cast — from Jessie’s no-nonsense greatest friend Kate to Tom’s cartoon villain of an agent, Kath (Minnie Driver) and her extremely thoughtful, perpetually anxious pal Joe (Joe Barnes). The show also avoids the pitfall of making Tom’s famous fiancee Clem a disposable villain, instead allowing Labbé to develop a nuanced character you actually don’t want to see hurt.

An ineffably sweet and acute ode to mess and choosing a path, Starstruck Season 3 is a victory lap for Matafeo, having developed her characters through years of real-time history and hijinks. We’ve loved this show for three seasons now, honey, and we want ’em all.

Starstruck Season 3 is now streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and will be streaming on Max from Sept. 28.