Cristin Milioti plays a wife on the run from her possessive husband in Made for Love, a cautionary tech tale.Courtesy of Amazon Prime
There’s an awful lot going on in Made for Love (streams Amazon Prime Video). Perhaps too much, with its dystopian take on technology and its central figure being a woman unleashed after a strange kind of bondage, but in the end its message is simple – if you want to find true love, stay out of the other person’s head.
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The series, made for HBO Max but landing here on the Amazon streaming platform, has a very splashy start. First there’s a fuzzily feel-good commercial for something called “Made for Love,” which appears to be a brain implant allowing loving couples to have access to each other’s innermost thoughts. Next, however, comes the real opening – a woman bursts out of a hatch in a desert-like landscape. She’s in a green sequined dress, wet and filthy. It looks like she burst out of the sewer.
That’s Hazel (Cristin Milioti), who is on the run, furious and has a head injury. Next, in a shift that too many series conjure these days, the drama goes back to 24 hours before. Hazel’s having sex with her chap, Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), who runs the tech-giant Gogol company. The couple live in a large, luxurious compound and Hazel’s needs are catered to, but she’s also being studied, morning, noon and night. We get the picture: Fed up and bored but not broken in spirit, she decided to leg it from luxury town.
Turns out, of course, that it’s hard to escape Byron because he’s put a chip in her head, can track her and, even if she’s not sure that he can know her every thought, she knows he can certainly see what she sees, through her eyes. There’s the expected chase by Byron’s henchmen, but neither Byron nor his crew seem very menacing. Byron is more benign egotist than monster, yet cocksure about his control over Hazel.
Nyasha Hatendi, left, Cristin Milioti and Billy Magnussen.Courtesy of Amazon Prime
Things get a bit more odd when Hazel lands in her hometown and finds her no-hoper dad Herbert (Ray Romano). Dad’s always been an oddball, a drinker and a disaster. But now he’s done something truly weird. After the death of his wife, he acquired a lifelike sex doll and now treats and presents her as his partner. The town heaps scorn on him, someone has scrawled “pervert” on his pickup truck but Herbert doesn’t care
Made for Love can be recommended as a curiosity, not as a must-see. There is so much disjointed unpacking of Hazel’s backstory that it sometimes loses the central thread. Mind you, it helps that the episodes are about 35 minutes long, so it is stopped from total meandering.
What it has going for it is a terrific, just-watch-me performance from Milioti, whose energy and brio keep the drama going full-tilt, even when the plot lines seem confusing. Milioti is obliged to play Hazel as three women. First there’s the person who was happy to marry the tech billionaire and live a secluded but stifling life. Then there’s the Hazel who begins to seethe as Byron’s tech innovations become outlandish and she realizes she is his big experiment. Then there’s the Hazel who’s full of rage and trying to figure out how her life become this strange mess.
The satiric aspect is rather gentle. Even in the time since the original novel that was the basis for the series – by Alissa Nutting – was published in 2017, and now, the landscape has shifted. Technology is even more pervasive in our lives and the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified that. The Byron figure is less than emphatic, though, and he could be a version of Mark Zuckerberg or a play on Jeff Bezos. But it’s good that he’s not the evil schemer you might expect. What he is, more than anything, is a controlling man looking for a susceptible woman.
There is some sharp dialogue that is more engaging than the sometimes muddled send-up of a technology-addicted society. Made for Love is entertaining and makes you think, but what it makes you think about is love, not gizmos and transforming tech. And what it says about love is, “Lover, you really don’t want to see inside my head. Just use your imagination.”
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