Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How To Ruin Love’ On Netflix, A ‘How To Ruin Christmas’ Spinoff Where An Actress Tries To Rebuild After Ruining Relationships

After the untimely 2022 death of Busisiwe Lurayi, we were wondering how the popular South American Netflix series How To Ruin Christmas was going to continue. It turns out that, instead of staying with the same crazy families that the original series featured, the show’s creators shifted to new families and a new person whose suspicious and jealous nature ruins everything.

HOW TO RUIN LOVE: THE PROPOSAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A romantic beach proposal, with a band, family and friends. Then a woman, visibly angry, storms the scene with a Champagne glass in her hands. She throws the glass at the couple, then starts a massive, wig-grabbing fight.

The Gist: Forty-eight hours earlier, Zoleka (Sivenathi Mabuya), an actress who plays a popular character on a first-season telenovela, wraps her last scene on the season finale. Her character gets poisoned at her wedding. When her co-star tells her he’s seen some scripts for the second season, Zoleka is alarmed that she hasn’t seen any. When she confronts the showrunners about her contract for the second season, they are noncomittal.

It doesn’t exactly make for a celebratory time when her boyfriend Kagiso (Bohang Moeko) visits her on set. They’ve been dating for three years and they have plans, mainly buying a piece of land that overlooks Johannesburg and building a house for their future family. They decide to go for it, to take their savings and buy the land. But first, Kagiso needs to meet Zoleka’s super-demanding father; a long-in-the-planning lunch has been set up for them to do just that.

Zoleka starts getting suspicious that Kagiso is seeing someone else, as he has sneaky phone calls with business associates as well as telling her that a woman she sees him talking to is a decorator for his sister’s sweet sixteen party. Then, at dinner with his business partner Sbu Twala (Sandile Mahlangu) and his wife, Beauty (Thando Thabethe), Kagiso says that he’s not ready to get married, mainly because he thinks Zoleka’s too modern to worry about things like that.

That comes as a shock to Zoleka, given all the plans they’ve been making. She goes back to her place, where her best friend Amahle (Noxolo Dlamini) has been staying. Amahle just thinks that Kagiso is being weird as marriage talk is bandied about. Zoleka decides to go to his sister’s birthday party and be “the wifiest wife” his parents have ever seen. And she asks Amahle to go with her.

At the party, she’s as amenable as she can be to Kagiso’s parents, and even volunteers to make the traditional porridge called “pap” to have with the rest of the meal. But Kagiso’s mom sees Amahle and says, “I know you!” and other weird things happen. After being distracted trying to figure out what her boyfriend is up to, she burns the pap, which gets her a ton of flak.

Her suspicion meter goes into the red when she finds out that night that Kagiso has left for Durban, where he’s about to make a huge deal for his app, early. When she goes to the resort town with her cousin, she finds Kagiso on the beach, proposing to a bewigged Amahle. But it’s after that, when Zoleka spills everyone’s secrets, that she finds out what’s really going on.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? How To Ruin Love is a spinoff of the two-season series How To Ruin Christmas, with the characters of Beauty and Sbu being the connection between the two. During Zoleka’s meltdown, Beauty even jokes to her husband that at least this mess isn’t happening to them this time around.

Our Take: How To Ruin Love: The Proposal has pretty much the same tone and humor as How To Ruin Christmas, only it has shifted the crazy happenings onto a different character. This is likely due to the untimely death of Christmas star Busisiwe Lurayi in October of 2022. Instead of trying to continue the story within the same family, Rethabile and Katleho Ramaphakela, the show’s creators, decided to create a new family and a new “ruiner,” for lack of a better term.

It works because Mabuya looks like she’s having a lot of fun playing Zoleka, someone who doesn’t think she’s suspicious by nature, but who still lets things spiral out of control once she gets an inkling that Kagiso might be getting cold feet. How she handles the aftermath of her reaction to what she stumbled upon in Durban is going to drive the rest of this season, and we hope that once the season is resolved, Zoleka becomes the focus of future seasons of this series.

We also are fine with having Beauty and Sbu be the connection between the two shows. Will it eventually bring both families back into the show’s universe? Maybe, but probably not. But. given that they were the ones whose wedding got ruined during the first season of Christmas, it’s fitting to have them observing someone else lose their ever loving minds from the outside. Perhaps they may even bring some sage advice to Zoleka and Kagiso, given their experience.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As it dawns on Zoleka what just happened, Beauty says to Sbu, “Thank goodness, it’s not our family this year.”

Sleeper Star: We’re intrigued by the story of Amahle, played by Noxolo Dlamini. Every time Zoleka introduces her to someone, Amahle tells people to call her “Amy”. Wonder what that’s all about?

Most Pilot-y Line: Gotta admit, the pap looked better burnt than it did while Zoleka was cooking it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. How To Ruin Love: The Proposal works because Sivenathi Mabuya looks like she’s having a blast as the show’s main “ruiner”. The rest of the show feels like standard “crazy family” stuff, but that’s fine because most of that material generates some good laughs.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.