Do some people-watching inside any cafe or restaurant or semi-exclusive party and you’ll notice that healthy couples (i.e., unions that aren’t based on the guy being rich and the woman being a gold-digger) always seem to be similarly attractive. If a woman is a 7.5 or an 8 she’ll tend to be with a guy who’s a 7.5 or an 8. Birds of a feather, etc. And so I always react negatively when this rule of thumb is ignored by hip filmmakers because of…you tell me, p.c. guidelines or whatever. Because this is not how it is out there.

Case in point: John Ridley‘s Guerilla, a six-part Showtime miniseries set in ’70s London. Because leading costar Freida Pinto is totally choice — anyone’s idea of an 8.5 if not a 9 — there’s no way I’m buying Babou Ceesay as her boyfriend. Too chubby, not good-looking enough, nope. Pinto and Ceesay are roughly equivalent to Grace Kelly and George Gobel being paired off in a 1954 romance of some kind. Or Faye Dunaway and Allen Garfield in a ’70s flick.

If Pinto was with Idris Elba, cool — he’s on her level. Or the equally good looking Derek Luke (Antwone Fisher, Catch A Fire). Remember Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudbury in Mira Nair‘s Mississippi Mesala (’91)? Now, there was a beautiful, nicely matched couple.

I really don’t like seeing hot actresses paired up with unremarkable guys with doughy faces who clearly need to be playing the clerk in a police station or a guy who gets shot during a bank robbery. People don’t want the schlubby guy to fuck the hot girl, period.