Star cast does best it can with tired scripts
LOS ANGELES In theory, a series based on Modern Love, the wildly popular New York Times column about real life relationships, is a slam dunk.
There’s no shortage of material, it already has an audience, and there’s no premise more open-ended than “love.” All a TV version of Modern Love had to do was pick compelling stories, connect some narrative dots and cast a handful of beautiful people.
Amazon’s adaptation, developed by Sing Street writer-director John Carney, is a success on exactly one of these fronts. You’ll hardly find a more charismatic and photogenic cast than this one, which includes actors like Dev Patel, Anne Hathaway, Catherine Keener, Andrew Scott and Tina Fey.
It’s tempting to feel a tiny twinge of warmth as they turn their luminous, earnest faces to each other, but then one will speak and the illusion shatters. No matter how valiantly they push through, there’s only so much they can do with what they’ve got, which is a saccharine series of clichés that promises way more insight than it’s ultimately capable of. The exception to this rule is the fourth episode (Rallying to Keep the Game Alive), an adaptation of Ann Leary’s 2013 column about her relationship with actor Denis. While Fey and John Slattery have decent chemistry as the unhappy couple, the reason this chapter works is because it was written and directed by Sharon Horgan, whose meditations on marriage in Catastrophe remain some of TV’s best. Subtle threads of disdain eventually reveal a tapestry of gnarled resentment, culminating in a pointed monologue (delivered by Fey) about all the ways a partner can make the other feel vanishingly small.
The biggest failure of Modern Love, however, belongs to its most ambitious. In Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am, Hathaway stars as Lexi, a bipolar woman who’s struggled to balance her manic episodes with her depressive ones. But as she describes what being manic feels like, Lexi imagines herself as the glittering heroine of a musical, complete with sporadic bursts into song. Then, when she crashes, the room goes dark. The script is so literal and Hathaway’s performance so extreme that reeling back from its sledgehammered themes leaves no room to feel for Lexi as a human being.
There’s also the fact that this episode’s themes and structure bear unavoidable similarities to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the CW musical series that was consistently insightful on mental illness, even through frantic jazz hands. It stretches credulity to believe that the Modern Love team wasn’t aware of the work Crazy Ex did in the exact arena, especially as Lexi takes a moment to star in her own TV show credits. Unfortunately for Modern Love, the side-by-side comparison to Crazy Ex isn’t a flattering one.
And it’s a shame.
Variety.com