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Critic Reviews
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John Carney’s series mutes the rich diversity of those experiences to one, long, neutral-toned lifestyle advertisement designed to flatter the paper’s readers and Amazon Prime’s viewers.
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The successes, minor and major, somehow make the missteps even more frustrating, because the ingredients for all the episodes are pretty similar. You take a column about someone’s personal experience, add a great cast, and attempt to dramatize that experience in 30 minutes. Yet somehow, only two are unabashed successes.
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Perhaps most egregiously of all, Modern Love, the television show, sands down the sharp, cutting, and often brutally introspective edges of Modern Love, the column.
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Modern Love had the chance to build upon the Times’ original essays, but to its detriment, the show adapted them as faithfully as possible, yielding mostly dull interpretations.
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Episodes begin disorientingly in the middle of something and build toward a reveal, which isn't a bad way to go when you have 25 minutes to tell a thousand-word story, but the payoff doesn’t always seem worth it.
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Overall, the feeling is one of anecdotes that have been told over and over until they have been smoothed into one familiar shape, losing all of the rough, awkward edges of what actually happened over time.
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Essays are round pegs, and episodes are square holes; few installments of Modern Love carry enough dramatic heft or character work to be worth the effort, and none retain what is so lovely and sharp-edged about the prose that inspired them.
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With an ensemble that also includes Tina Fey, Andrew Scott, and Julia Garner, the show feels like something of a missed opportunity. But while the quality isn’t quite up to par across the board, there’s likely still a viable audience for a show like Modern Love. Just don’t be surprised if it’s not for you.
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No matter how valiantly they [the cast] 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. .. It serves up plate after plate of lukewarm leftovers that are somehow never filling.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 38
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Mixed: 7 out of 38
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Negative: 6 out of 38
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Mar 20, 2023Decent but aggressively unexceptional. Saved by the versatile cast that delivers consistently.
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May 19, 2020
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Oct 22, 2019It's such a great story. Full of emotions, and characters' exploration. It feels like an authentic narrative, loved it