Cristin Milioti has claimed a curiously particular character area of interest: lady escaping from twisted sci-fi lure. In the “Black Mirror” episode “USS Callister,” she was programmed right into a simulation by her creepy boss. In final yr’s “Palm Springs,” she and Andy Samberg puzzled out how you can break away of a time loop that caught them in a vicious “Groundhog Day” rom-com cycle.
In “Made for Love,” a light-handed and dark-minded comedy of expertise, management and gaslighting whose first three episodes arrive Thursday on HBO Max, the snare is all in her head.
As in bodily. As in implanted. As in a microchip.
Hazel Green (Milioti) obtained this undesirable {hardware} improve from her husband, Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), who runs a world-dominating tech firm. (Feel free to mess around with the primary vowel sound in “Gogol.”) For 10 years, they’ve lived in a gilded cage — or relatively a gilded dice, a virtual-reality atmosphere known as the Hub, secluded from the messy exterior world, with eternally good climate and a dolphin sporting within the swimming pool.
And for 10 years, Byron has grown extra devoted. Too devoted. “Have your wife review her biometrically recorded orgasms to better optimize them” devoted. Finally, he decides that he loves her — and his expertise — so deeply that he and she is going to develop into “Users One” of his new product, Made for Love, which makes {couples} into two-person neural networks, their brains digitally linked. No extra secrets and techniques, no extra miscommunication, no extra non-public ideas.
Who the hell would need that? you may ask, a query “Made for Love” raises however doesn’t solely reply. For the needs of the story, what’s necessary is that Byron desires it and Hazel emphatically doesn’t. This impels her to fly the dice, a madcap and violent escape with Byron watching from behind her eyeballs. (Turns out he implanted solely her chip, not his: “I had to read your diary first to know if I could let you read mine.”)
Based on the novel of the same name by Alissa Nutting, a author and producer on the sequence, “Made for Love” performs out as a screwball motion satire, which probably makes its chilling premise — patriarchy and techno-utopianism as two sides of the identical chip — go down simpler than it will as a straight drama. (Christina Lee of the mordant “Search Party” is the showrunner; different producers embrace Patrick Somerville of Netflix’s “Maniac,” with which this shares a skeevy-dystopian vibe.)
The metaphors are by no means far beneath the floor right here, like Byron and Hazel’s double-finger wedding ceremony bands, reminiscent of tiny handcuffs. And when Hazel seeks assist from her widowed father, Herb (Ray Romano), she finds him having taken up a dedicated partnership with a intercourse doll — sorry, “synthetic partner” — named Diane. Their one-way relationship is an echo of what Byron is attempting to make Hazel into, a spouse machine, nevertheless it’s additionally oddly tender and respectful.
“Made for Love” is hardly refined, and its cautionary tech story has been informed repeatedly in “Black Mirror” and elsewhere. But it’s playful and humorous and nearly momentum-driven sufficient to get away with hand-waving away its many implausibilities. Among these is the query of why Hazel, introduced as a wily, resourceful skeptic, would have been swept off her ft by Byron, who from their first assembly throws up sufficient crimson flags for an enormous slalom course.
The casting helps put this over. Milioti, together with her attraction and anime eyes, is an nearly too-perfect rom-com-lead kind. (She broke out on TV because the title determine in “How I Met Your Mother.”) But she neatly plays against that type in tales that subvert expectations. Her Hazel is crafty, feral and sardonic on the lam; in flashbacks to her married life within the Hub, you’ll be able to nearly hear her scream behind her 10,000-watt smile.
Romano, in the meantime, could also be one of the few actors you possibly can introduce in mattress with a humanoid intercourse toy, whom he clothes in his useless spouse’s clothes, but have your viewer assume, “You know, this seems like a complicated guy who’s been through a few rough patches.”
And Magnussen, given the broadest of the central roles, pushes Byron’s zealotry previous tilt. Inept at most human relationships, Byron has funneled all his emotional capability into Hazel, out of each ardour and the gamifying impulse to get the all-time excessive rating on his marriage. He’s the epitome of each the obsessive Wife Guy and the hubristic Tech Guy, and he makes plain the connection between the 2 sorts.
He’s additionally pitiable, insofar as a billionaire with godlike powers might be. “I am the only person who actually loves you!” he pleads to Hazel. “Objectively!”
But it’s Milioti who offers the season’s first half (I’ve seen 4 episodes of eight) its adrenaline. “Made for Love” is a crazy jolt to the cortex that calls for a excessive tolerance for absurdity. What grounds it’s Hazel’s journey from saved lady to motion hero, decided to not be a personality in anyone else’s love story.
