Amazon’s ‘Modern Love’ Review: The NYTimes Column Makes for a Sweet & Decadent Treat of a Show

Watching Amazon‘s new anthology series Modern Love is like eating a cupcake from New York City’s famed Magnolia Bakery. Each episode is easy to digest, almost cloyingly sweet, and full of that late ’00s bougie NYC vibe. By pulling its stories from The New York Times‘s famed “Modern Love” column — a collection of crowd-sourced true stories from Times readers — Modern Love carries the strengths and the weaknesses of that same column onto the screen. For one, the show is tender, life-affirming, and the storytelling equivalent of a warm hug. However, it’s also dripping in an elitist New York sensibility and focused on the lives and loves of the metropolis’s most privileged, aka the stereotypical Times reader.

Modern Love is an anthology series comprised of eight half-hour episodes, each focused on dramatizing an original piece from the “Modern Love” column. The first episode, “When the Doorman is Your Main Man” is inspired by one woman’s story of how a meddling foreign doorman in her building first derailed her love life, and then proved himself to be the most loving figure in her life. Later episodes delve into the drama of romantic drama gone wrong, the bonding power of parenthood, old love, new love, and the trials facing a couple as their children prepare to leave the nest. Modern Love is less about romantic love than it is in the surprising ways love takes shape in our contemporary lives. So it’s not about dating apps, but more about what happens when we confront each other honestly.

Much of Modern Love‘s oomph comes from its star-studded cast. Anne Hathaway carries an episode about a woman struggling to cope with the dramatic highs and lows of bi-polar disorder, while Dev Patel and Catherine Keener play electrically off each other as a young tech entrepreneur and the nosy journalist interviewing him. But maybe the best casting coup is in the episode called “Rallying to Keep the Game Alive.” The understated story from writer/director Sharon Horgan is basically a showcase for Tina Fey and John Slattery to show how magnificent both are at depicting the subtle, crotchety frustrations shared between long-term partners.

While most of Modern Love‘s episodes are accomplished, sweet, and appealingly quirky, one installment starring recent Emmy winner Julia Garner as a young woman lusting after an older man never quite finds a palatable tone. Maybe it’s the way she cheerfully explains how she sleeps with the socks she stole from their date, or the almost predatory way actor Shea Whigham seems to seduce the willing young woman. Either way, “So He Looked Like Dad. It Was Just Dinner, Right?” never transcends the awkwardness of its set up.

Besides that, every other episode found places to charm even this cynic’s hardened heart. In Episode 5, “At the Hospital, an Interlude of Clarity,” a nervous young man’s dream date with a captivating beauty turns into a set-up for both to reveal themselves at their most wounded, damaged, ruined, and vulnerable. Sofia Boutella’s riff on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in that story becomes all the more intriguing when she rats herself out. Episode 7, “Hers Was a World of One,” has a rather hilarious subplot involving the mismatched characters dogs, and the show’s final episode, “The Race Grows Sweeter Near Its Final Lap,” is a devastatingly sweet look at love’s power to move us, always.

For all its positives, Modern Love fumbles a bit when binged as a whole and the anthology’s major blind spot becomes obvious. The characters are almost all upper class New Yorkers living in spacious pre-war apartments, filling their idle hours with movies, tennis, and restaurant hopping. It feels as though a whole swath of modern life is overlooked. Plus, the opening credits don’t match the show itself. Each episode opens with a whimsical slideshow of lovers being very much in love. These photos represent different times, classes, races, and milieus, but always romantic love. Modern Love is fixed on the concept of love as it pertains to New York’s wealthy class, and not this kaleidoscope of passion.

Nevertheless, Modern Love is a delicious, easy, lovely dream of a show. Like the column that inspired it, it’s all goodness and charm, with none of the trickier, meaner pain that’s constantly pushing into our lives. The performances are fantastic, the stories mostly winsome, and the ending is so saccharine sweet that you really will feel like you’re getting a jolt of sugar to the brain. Modern Love is essentially Amazon’s elevated take on the same cloyingly earnest storytelling you’d find in a show like This is Us. Only Modern Love would never stoop to feature a hero wearing nothing but a “Terrible Towel.” It’s only luxe Egyptian cotton for these characters.

Modern Love premieres on Prime Video on Friday, October 18.

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