If You Don’t Watch Netflix’s Hit ‘Set It Up’ Soon, You’ll Be Irrelevant

Glen Powell and Zoey Deutch. Image by Getty Images

By Jenny Singer June 25, 2018

“Set It Up,” a Netflix original movie, is the sleeper hit of the summer. The romantic comedy that showed up at the top of everyone’s Netflix home page this week is one hour and forty-five minutes of untrammeled joy in a ruthlessly miserable world.

We bring it to your attention because it was written by Jewish screenwriter Katie Silberman, stars Jewish actress Zoey Deutsch, and features Jewish pinup boy and America’s fiancé Pete Davidson, not to mention former-Israeli-ambassador-to-the-United-States Michael Oren’s nephew Jon Rudnitzky (yeah, that’s right.)

But we also bring it to your attention because if you do not watch this movie or at least pay extremely close attention to the following series of GIFs, you will be so much in the minority that you will fade slowly into irrelevance, like the non-memorialized ancestors in the movie “Coco.”

Set It Up was written by Katie Silberman.

The lovely Ms. Silberman, we must say respectfully, did not make her religious convictions easily discoverable on the internet. During an extremely deep Google dive in which we perused Silberman’s college newspaper articles and tabbed through her wedding registry, we finally chanced upon a note written by her grandfather to his alumni magazine about his time as a fraternity member. Silberman’s grandfather named Silberman’s brother in the letter, and we corroborated with Ms. Silberman’s brother’s Facebook that all these Silbermans were connected. Then we googled the Silverman patriarch and found out that he is a judge on the US Court of Appeals. And then a very, very long time later, we found an article in the JTA from 1987 that says that he is Jewish.

So. We will not ever get that time back. But we will say that Katie Silberman’s script is funny and biting and contains some “I love you” speeches that will be showing up in best-of-romcom listicles for the rest of our lives.

One of our favorite Katie Silberman lines.

“Set It Up” stars Zoey Deutsch and Glen Powell as overworked assistants who hatch a plan to trick their insane bosses into falling in love with each other in an attempt to make their jobs easier.

Let’s meet Glen Powell.

When you first see that the star of “Set It Up” is just another Germanic-looking blonde man named Glen, you will wonder what this random golf caddy is doing on your TV screen. However, by the end of the movie you will be in such deep, deep love with Glen Powell that you will beg for mercy from his piercing eyes and emotionally overwhelming facial expressions.

His smile will remind you of a cartoon weasel and that will be a comfort:

Here’s Zoey Deutch.

Zoey Deutch is so cute and funny that it seems the only choice will be to eat her.

Powell’s boss is played by Taye Diggs, who you may know from your most sexually explicit dreams.

Deutsch’s boss is played by Her Majesty Lucy Liu, a woman who is genetically incapable of being less than fabulous.

Our favorite Jewish, pot-smoking Ken Doll Pete Davidson is in the movie, so we know God herself was involved in the casting.

Do we think it’s a bummer that Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs — who have been building major careers since the 1990’s plus happen to be two of the most attractive people alive — are leads in “Set It Up,” yet Deutsch and Powell, who are talented but more importantly young and white, waltzed into Hollywood and got starring roles in this movie?

Reader, we do.

But we’re glad to have this anyway.

Jenny Singer is the deputy lifestyle editor for the Forward. You can reach her at Singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

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