HBO Max’s new half-hour series, Made for Love, is a peculiar creature. Too absurd to be a drama, too spineless to work as satire, the program shuffles along in comedy’s boots but possesses none of that genre’s timing, wit, or irreverent insight. Like most HBO productions, it is well cast and sumptuously filmed. What it lacks, through its entire eight-episode run, is a single legitimately funny moment.
The series commences in the middle of the California desert, where 30-something protagonist Hazel Green (Cristin Milioti) is crawling out of an underground tunnel into the fresh air and sunshine. Behind her, glimmering and remote, is the global headquarters of Gogol, a decidedly unveiled stand-in for a certain ubiquitous tech giant. In fleeing this “hub,” her home and de facto prison for the last 10 years, Hazel is likewise escaping her husband, Byron (Billy Magnussen), the firm’s preposterously idiosyncratic founder. Her complaint? Byron has invented a neurological implant that will turn the couple into “a network of two,” with “every thought, every feeling, shared.” Privacy watchdogs of the world, meet your next assignment.
To no one’s surprise but her own, Hazel learns shortly after her getaway that she has already been fitted with Byron’s odious chip, a device disparaged by a sympathetic friend as “no better than a spy cam.” Taking refuge in her father Herbert’s (Ray Romano) ramshackle bungalow, Hazel plots her next move even as she comes to terms with the fact that her husband can literally read her mind. Accompanying our heroine as she attempts to restart her life are a pair of misfits who clearly mean to be funny but fall well short of the mark. Bangles (Patti Harrison), a high school friend of manifest shiftlessness, is eager to help but has few ideas beyond flashing the “camera” hidden behind Hazel’s eyes. Judiff (Kym Whitley), a sometime nun with a side interest in victim advocacy, is the more practical accomplice but has little to do besides flirt with an uninterested Herbert.
Though Made for Love’s chief focus is on Hazel’s post-hub existence, the show’s most noteworthy scenes may be its flashbacks to her routine inside the Gogol compound. There, trapped in a home so “smart” that computers prompt her to rate her husband’s lovemaking, Hazel swims with a pet dolphin but is completely isolated from human society. Digital “cubes” project seamless images of tree-strewn hillsides, but nothing in sight is tangible or real. To the extent that these scenes lampoon the tech industry’s excesses, they are clever enough. But as is often the case when Hollywood skewers its own allies, conservative viewers are likely to be struck by the show’s lack of daring. By emphasizing Big Tech’s frivolity, self-satisfaction, and propensity to snoop, Made for Love skirts the more pressing matter of tech firms’ creeping authoritarianism where political speech is concerned. The reason for this dodge is, of course, obvious. HBO’s writers and audiences may dislike the industry’s smugness, but they like very much its willingness to censor unwelcome points of view.
That a similar dynamic is at work in the program’s attempts to earn laughs may be part of its failure in that department, as well. Having convinced itself that the tech sector’s flaws are essentially apolitical, Made for Love has removed from the table a major source of comic material. What remains — namely, the increasingly ridiculous quirks of the show’s characters — is simply too paltry to provide much humor. It is, I suppose, slightly amusing to see Byron hanging from the ceiling in a “sensory cocoon,” but gags of that sort are not exactly side-splitting. Nor, for that matter, is there anything especially hilarious about Herbert’s possession of a life-size sex doll. (“I was Byron’s doll,” Hazel remarks, in case the viewer is a complete idiot.) So bereft is the series of chuckle-inducing moments, in fact, that I found myself pining for the old-fashioned sitcom laugh track. At least then, I would have known where the jokes were supposed to be.
If Made for Love has a saving virtue, it is the general watchability of its trio of stars, a factor that rescues the show from total disaster. In Milioti, a veteran of such TV projects as Fargo and How I Met Your Mother, the series has on its hands an expressive lead whose working-class beauty clashes effectively with Gogol’s futuristic aesthetic. Though overwrought at times, Magnussen’s performance as Byron is agreeably manic without quite crossing the line into charmlessness. Best of all are the efforts of Romano as Hazel’s downtrodden, distracted father. An actor of notable ease and dexterity, Romano is better used as a straight man surrounded by more prominent jokesters. See, for example, all nine seasons of Everybody Loves Raymond. Yet even in a production this dry, it’s difficult not to enjoy the time he spends on screen.
As its season finale makes clear, Made for Love seems determined, in any future episodes, to retain its basic shape and tone. Given the talent level of its cast, such a move could conceivably pay off. All the show needs is what a thousand lackluster comedies before it could have used: better writers.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
