It's hard to imagine a TV show about four female friends navigating life in the big city not inviting comparisons to Girls or Sex in the City.
The description does indeed apply to Peacock's new series, Everything I Know About Love—just swap out New York City with London—and while cast members Emma Appleton, Marli Siu and Aliyah Odoffin told E! News they find said comparisons incredibly flattering, they're not exactly accurate.
"I think it's the compliment of inspiration," Aliyah said. "I think that's where those comparisons come from...but ultimately, there's so [many] differences that we're finding in this show with the characters, how we see them together, how we see them apart and that whole thing."
Emma, for her part, views the tendency to group female-fronted shows together as the natural result of men-led shows dominating TV across all genres for so long. "We're not used to seeing shows with a predominant female group," she explained, "so I think it's like, 'Ohhh, it's like this show,' whereas there's loads of shows where it's a group of blokes, but they don't really get compared to each other because there's so many of them."
But if Emma had to actually compare Everything I Know About Love to either series—both of which she admitted were "revolutionary"—she'd say they're simply under the same umbrella. "I hope when people watch it," she continued, "they're like, 'Oh, no, it's still very much its own thing.'"
That shouldn't be a problem, though—after all, the show is specifically inspired by Dolly Alderton's memoir of the same name. Emma plays wild child Maggie, who's living with her childhood BFF Birdy (Bel Powley) and their university pals Nell (Marli) and Amara (Aliyah) in a London house-share. They do everything the average 20-something does—including dating around—but at the end of the day, the show's central love story is the friendship between Maggie and Birdy.
"I think [friendships] always get the backseat treatment for a romantic relationship being front and center," Emma told E! News, "but I think it makes you realize that there is so much romance in friendships and especially being in your early 20s, your longest relationships have been with your friends and so it's so nice to just pay attention to that and pay respect to it."
The Peacock series also pays close attention to the specific sort of chaos that comes with this in-between period of life, which nostalgia often downplays, Marli explained. "When you're a bit older, you can look at it and be like, I actually did have so much fun," she said, "but at the time, it was messy."
Hear more from Marli, Emma and Aliyah in the above E! News interview.
Everything I Know About Love is now streaming on Peacock.