Cristin Millioti is great in "Made For Love," but damn, this show is depressing
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I love Cristin Millioti — she’s great in Palm Springs, she was awesome on the “USS Callister” episode of Black Mirror, and she was so good on the final season of How I Met Your Mother that she almost made Ted Mosby likeable (a herculean feat). So I was super excited to jump into her new HBO Max comedy Made For Love.
And Made For Love is a good show! Millioti is as excellent as she always is, Ray Romano is very funny as her dad, and Billy Magnussen is great as her tech mogul husband. That said, though, it’s still a whole season of watching a woman struggle to get away from her unhinged, domineering partner who can literally watch her every move and find her wherever she goes. Which is… upsetting.
Made For Love takes place in the near future — we begin by seeing Hazel (Millioti) climb out of a sewer in the middle of the desert, wearing a green, sequinned dress (it’s fabulous) and running away. Turns out, she’s spent the last ten years living in “The Hub,” a compound that her husband Byron (Magnussen) had built that manages their every movie and provides their every desire (and therefore giving them no reason or ability to leave). Hazel is escaping because Byron planned to implant chips in their brains that would allow them to track each other and reach each other’s minds — except, as she discovers when she returns to her hometown to live with her dad (Romano), Byron already had her chip secretly implanted, and he can follow and watch her at all times.
The show jumps between several different time periods, from Hazel’s life after the Hub, back to their “ideal” but unfulfilling relationship within the Hub, to Hazel’s childhood, to how she met and agreed to marry Byron in the first place. There’s a lot of “how far has technology gone” stuff, and it’s not done badly (there are some decent gags), and Magnussen does his usual “handsome sociopath” schtick really well. (What a way to be typecast!) Romano gets to be both funny and sad at the same time, playing a lonely man who’s been labelled the town pervert because of his serious relationship with Diane, his “synthetic partner” (i.e. a realistic sex doll).
Unsurprisingly, Millioti completely sells the entire bonkers premise, from why she would have agreed to be with Byron in the first place, to her furious and terrified breakdown after realizing what he’s done to her and what he’s capable of doing. (Again, this is a comedy!!)
And that’s the thing — no matter how good these actors are, it’s still really, really hard to watch eight episodes of a woman deal with this. The show isn’t remotely on Byron’s side and doesn’t hold back from showcasing his awfulness, but because it’s also a comedy, there’s a lot of time spent with him, which is also really hard. (Partway through the season, a character is introduced who makes it seem like Hazel will be able to turn the tables on Byron, but sadly, that character doesn’t amount to much by the end of the eight episodes.) Again, Magnussen is really good in this role and manages to make Byron feel like an actual character, but you can’t avoid the anxiety of realizing that Hazel can’t escape this guy. Maybe that’s the point, though! Maybe the show wants to be funny AND make us feel anxious, and that’s definitely a choice they can make.
Also, the show has two characters whose names are “Fiffany” and “Judiff,” which are funny names on their own, but those also happen to be the only characters of colour in the whole show, so the result seems like a bit of a racist reference to Black naming conventions. I’m unsure if this was on purpose (the show is based on a book I haven’t read, so maybe the characters weren’t Black in the novel), but it’s not a great look.
But again, I didn’t dislike Made For Love — it’s a good and well-made show! The performances are excellent, there are very good jokes, and I wanted to keep watching to find out what happened. But I just knew what happened wasn’t going to be good for Hazel. And having that in the back of my mind the whole time was hard.
The end of the season sets up a potential Season 2, so yes, there’s absolutely room for this story to progress to a satisfying ending, and I probably will still watch (I’m a Millioti stan 4EVA). But it’s definitely a show I’ll need to be in the right mindframe for.
Made For Love is on HBO Max in the U.S. and on Amazon Prime in Canada.
That’s all for me today, gorgeous! Talk to you soon.
Love,
Kat
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