General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Young Love

Young Love is a 2D animated comedy-drama series created by Matthew A. Cherry for HBO Max that continues the story of the Chicago family introduced in his Academy Award-winning 2019 short film Hair Love.¹ The 12-episode series follows millennial parents Stephen and Angela Young, their daughter Zuri, and her pet cat Rocky as they juggle careers, marriage, parenthood, social issues, and multi-generational family dynamics while striving for a better life.² It premiered on September 21, 2023 and ran its single season through October 5, 2023.³

Key fact	Detail
Premise	Millennial parents Stephen and Angela Young, daughter Zuri, and pet cat Rocky balance careers, marriage, parenthood, and social issues²
Origin	Expansion of Hair Love, the 2019 Oscar-winning animated short, ordered by HBO Max in a 12-episode, 2D-animated season on July 7, 2020¹
Premiere	September 21, 2023 on Max, with four episodes released each Thursday for three weeks⁴
Voice cast	Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi, Issa Rae, Loretta Devine, Harry Lennix, Tamar Braxton, and Brooke Conaway²
Reception	100% on the Tomatometer from 17 critics; Metascore 80; IMDb rating 7.4/10 from 398 users⁵^•⁶^•⁷
Status	Ended after one season; the finale, "Love Love," aired October 5, 2023³

Spoilers

Story and setting

The series picks up shortly after the events of Hair Love, with Angela now cancer-free and in remission. Season 1 follows the family as Angela returns to work and to a salon career while Stephen pursues music production, including his dealings with the up-and-coming rapper Lil Ankh.¹² Episodes touch on bills and career doubts, artistic integrity, gender roles, exploitation, gentrification, and Stephen's childhood traumas.¹²^•⁹ The first season's twelve episodes run from "Self Love" through "Love Love," and in the finale Angela and Stephen begin to consider marriage after Zuri voices insecurity about her parents' relationship.¹³^•³

Chicago grounding. Cherry grew up in Mayfair on Chicago's Northwest Side and based much of the show, including the family's two-flat apartment building, on his relatives in West Garfield Park and North Lawndale; his stated goal was to counter negative portrayals of Chicago in the media.¹⁴

Zuri's character. Zuri, expanded from her role in the short, is written as a strong, confident and witty leader with a Gen Z spirit and a low tolerance for injustice. Executive producer Karen Rupert Toliver's suggestion to elevate Zuri's dialogue made the six-year-old relatable to adult viewers, and the show's creatives made the problems she encounters allegorical to those adults face.¹²^•¹⁴

Origin from Hair Love

The series grew out of Hair Love, a short film of a little under seven minutes about a Black father, Stephen, attempting to style his daughter Zuri's hair for the first time while her mother Angela was in the hospital receiving chemotherapy treatment.⁸ The short was funded through Kickstarter, posted on YouTube, and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short at the 2020 ceremony; it was also adapted as a book that has sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide.⁹^•¹⁰ By the time the series was developed, the short had accumulated roughly 100 million YouTube views, a fanbase the creators did not want to alienate.¹⁰

Cherry, a Chicago-born filmmaker and former NFL wide receiver turned director, had begun the Hair Love project in 2017 with the aim of featuring more Black characters in animation, including Black fathers.¹⁰^•¹¹ HBO Max greenlit the 12-episode season on July 7, 2020, with Cherry showrunning alongside animation veteran Carl Jones of The Boondocks and Black Dynamite.¹ Executive producers included Monica A. Young of Blue Key Entertainment, Karen Rupert Toliver of Sony Pictures Animation, and Lion Forge Animation's David Steward II and Carl Reed.¹

Production

The series was produced with Sony Pictures Animation, animated by Atomic Cartoons in Vancouver, with storyboards from House of Cool in Toronto; Karen Malach produced. Like the short, it used Toon Boom Harmony software, though the series is less hand-drawn, a difference Cherry attributed to the expanded workload of twelve half-hour episodes.¹⁰^•¹¹ Production spanned the COVID-19 pandemic with a fully remote team spread across Vancouver, Toronto, and the United States.¹⁰^•⁴

Family co-viewing. Cherry, for whom Young Love was a first showrunning job and a first writers' room, aimed for a series parents and children could watch together, modeled on classic family sitcoms such as Black-ish and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.¹²^•¹⁵ Critics described the result as playing like an animated version of a traditional 1980s and 1990s sitcom, with a main plot and subplot resolved in a little over 20 minutes, while using animation's freedom for fantasy sequences, mainly Zuri's vivid imagination.⁸^•¹⁶ Rendy Jones of RogerEbert.com placed it in the lineage of Black sitcoms such as Roc, Abbott Elementary, and Good Times, noting that it examines social and generational topics from a Black-millennial lens.⁹^•¹⁶

Voice cast

Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi voices Stephen, Issa Rae voices Angela, and Brooke Monroe Conaway voices Zuri; Rae reprises her voice role from the original short.¹⁷^•² The supporting cast includes Loretta Devine as Gigi Young, Harry Lennix as Russell Young, Tamar Braxton as Star, and Sheryl Lee Ralph and Debra Wilson in additional roles.⁵^•¹⁸ Reviewers singled out the cast's performances: Jones praised Rae's comic timing and called the young Conaway the standout comic relief.⁹

Reception

Season 1 received strong critical notices. On Rotten Tomatoes, all 17 reviewed critics gave the season a positive review, a 100% Tomatometer, with a critics consensus calling it "vibrantly animated" and "exemplary wholesome entertainment"; the audience Popcornmeter stood at 88% on fewer than 50 ratings.⁵ Metacritic reported a metascore of 80 from six critics, all positive.⁶ Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times, whose outlet scored it 88, praised the expansion of the mimed short into a fully voiced series; Nina Metz of the Chicago Tribune called it "charming but not treacly"; IGN, the most reserved of the six at 70, found some of the positive messaging less impactful because of a reserved approach to weightier themes.⁶ Common Sense Media rated the show appropriate for ages 10 and up, noting occasional mild swearing, innuendo, and the potentially scary idea of a parent hospitalized for two months, while praising its portrayal of a Black family showing up authentically for one another.¹⁹

The series ran only its one ordered season on Max; TVmaze lists its status as ended, with HBO Max as its web channel for 2023 only.³ As of July 2026 it was not available on Dutch streaming services, though it remained streamable on HBO Max in the United States.²⁰^•²¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Animated television series (individual series) › Children's animated adventure and fantasy series › Comedy and slice-of-life series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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