Cristin Milioti plays a wife on the run from her possessive husband in Made for Love.BETH DUBBER/Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
This column is all recommendation today. The release of the Emmy nominations was a sterling reminder of the sheer amount of TV content and that some series are unfairly forgotten in the swarm of new releases or fall off the radar.
Made for Love (two seasons on Amazon Prime Video) is one of those shows. It first arrived last year and was a sizzler from the opening scene – a woman bursts out of a hatch in a desertlike landscape, possibly from a sewer, dressed in a green sequined dress, wet and filthy, and clearly on the run from something. She’s Hazel (Cristin Milioti), furious and fleeing a controlling husband.
But, not just any jerk of a domineering spouse. He’s Byron (Billy Magnussen), who owns the tech-giant Gogol company. You see, he’s put a chip in her head, can track her every move, possibly read her thoughts and can see what she sees, through her eyes. He thinks it’s true love when you can read your partner’s thoughts.
Now, it might seem the drama is setting up Byron as a representative figure; he’s an obsessive and like a lot of men, confuses love-bombing with affection, and he could be presented as an ogre. But Byron isn’t that. He’s a genius but gentle, an oddball who is merely muddled in his thinking.
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Now that there are two full seasons – eight half-hour episodes per season – the sheer fun of the series can be appreciated. Made for Love has an engine full of rage, and a sharp satirical edge, but it is also curiously thoughtful, an almost mournful meditation on the twin human needs for independence and connection.
When Hazel first bolts from Byron’s weirdly gentle embrace at his centre of operations, called The Hub, she races to find her father. That’s Herbert (Ray Romano), a laid-back crank who used to be a drunk and is still recovering from the death of his wife. As part of recovering, he’s acquired a lifelike sex doll and now treats and presents her as his partner. In his small town, he’s treated as a weirdo but he’s oblivious. He’s a guy who just doesn’t care.
The second season pulls off a perplexing twist. Hazel has returned to The Hub and is living with Byron again, but only for as long as it takes Byron to treat Herbert’s cancer and her dad is well. While putting up with Byron, she imagines terrible violence against him, including beating his brains with a golf club. Meanwhile, Herbert is getting used to the good life that is artificially created for him. Oh, by the way, the FBI are also looking into Byron and what happens at The Hub. The manner in which that investigation is presented is outright comedy, and outlandish.
Based on the novel by Alissa Nutting, who also helped adapt and write the series, Made for Love is rather like the fairy tale Rapunzel with an injection of feminist rage and caustic humour. It’s wacky but the outrageous aspects of it never become wearying. Yes, it’s dystopian in that it ponders the issue of Big Tech getting involved in the very human emotions of love and romance. Yet it never seems entirely bleak, even as it offers the disturbing idea that many men see the ideal woman as an inanimate object, it counters that with Hazel’s very real, visceral fury.
Don’t expect to find a plot without holes. This is a satire about technology that doesn’t go for the easy resolution or the expected, mechanical turn. Do expect excellent performances. Cristin Milioti is stunningly good here and in almost every scene. She can command attention with a glare and there’s fabulous energy in her acting.
Ray Romano is at last stretching his considerable skills beyond sitcom acting and the Herbert he embodies here feels like a fully inhabited figure. And Billy Magnussen pulls off the considerable task of making Byron a completely plausible sociopath. Byron’s ability with technology somehow makes his inability with real life very real and very disturbing. Last year I said Made for Love was great but not a don’t-miss series. Now it has the stature it reached for.
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