‘Laid’ review: Stephanie Hsu and Zosia Mamet shine in this funny, bingeable rom-com mystery

In “Laid,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, Stephanie Hsu plays Ruby, a self-centered woman of 33 who discovers that everyone she has ever had sex with is dead or dying, in the order she had sex with them. “He was a really good person.” “You used to call him Farty Scorsese,” AJ reminds her, while AJ’s cheerful hippie slacker gamer boyfriend, Zack, suggests that the reason why none of Ruby’s “thousands” of dates have proved satisfactory might have something to do with Ruby herself. Ruby imagines she might have a stalker who out of jealousy has been killing her old boyfriends, girlfriends and half-remembered hookups, but as they’re caused by a mixture of natural causes and horrible accidents, the viewer never entertains this seriously; nor do the police, whose help Ruby seeks, arriving at the station — or “police house,” as she calls it — with a box she is certain contains a severed head. AJ, however, is only too happy to take the mystery on: “I know every girl now is obsessed with murder, but I started the trend.” She creates a “sex timeline,” like a detective show murder board, with pictures and yarn and a list of her theories of the case, which include “the moon,” “Nathan Fielder” and “reverse Jane Wick.” “I love this for us!” she cries. Ruby is not the first rom-com heroine shaped by an obsession with rom-coms — “I want an epic kiss in the rain or a big speech about how someone loves every little flaw in me” — and besides the whole people dying thing, her main concern is Hallmark handsome Isaac, who has hired her to organize his parents’ 40th anniversary.