Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Made For Love’ On HBO Max, Where Cristin Milioti Fights A Controlling Chip In Her Brain That Her Husband Installed

Would you want a chip in your brain that gave your significant other access into all of your innermost thoughts? We didn’t think so. But what if you got that chip and you didn’t find out until afterwards? That’s the situation in which Cristin Milioti finds herself in the dark comedy Made For Love.

MADE FOR LOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of people kissing each other and getting married. “Love,” says the commercial’s voice over, “It’s the center of our lives. But our lives have changed; our lives have evolved around us.”

The Gist: The voice on the commercial is Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), who leads the massive Gogol company. It’s an ad for “Made For Love,” a brain implant that gives loving couples access to each other’s thoughts. In the ad is Byron’s wife Hazel (Cristin Milioti).

But the first thing we see after the commercial is a woman popping out of a hatch in the middle of a desolate landscape. She’s all wet, wearing a short green sequined dress and just bumped her head on the hatch door. As she flags down a radio station van to escape the Gogol compound’s perimeter, we flash back 24 hours. Hazel is getting oral sex from Byron and she orgasms hard, but he’s ok without reciprocation.

She hasn’t left the Gogol compound in ten years, and she’s miserable, because Byron seems to control every aspect of her life. She can even call up an “orgasm report” and rate that last time she came. Meanwhile, Byron is reveling over the riots caused by the release of his last tablet (Hazel suggests sending a tablet to the injured parties) and is prepping for a huge board meeting to announce his new Made For Love implant; his assistants Herringbone (Dan Bakkedahl) and Fiffany (Noma Dumezweni) are definitely concerned that he’s rolling it out way too soon.

We then go back to Hazel’s escape; she makes her way into a strip club, gets some fresh clothes, and tries to leave. But when she sees Herringbone there, she tries to hide. He’s got some information from her, but she’s so afraid she’ll have to go back, she arms herself with a fire ax and cuts Herringbone’s fingers off when he reaches in to turn on the lights where she’s hiding.

Back to the day before; during the board meeting, Hazel finds out that she is going to be “User 0” for the chip, something Byron never consulted her about. This is when she plans her escape. But we then see, after she manages to run from Herringbone, that Byron seems to know where she is at all times, calling her on people’s cell phones and on random pay phones. That’s when she realizes that Byron has already put the chip in her head.

She eventually gets to the house of her father Herbert Green (Ray Romano). The first sight of him in ten years is him on top of his Real Doll companion.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Not sure why, but Made For Love almost feels like a dark companion piece to HBO Max’s first original series, Love Life. In the first series, Anna Kendrick’s character is constantly making love mistakes but she keeps trying. Here, Milioti’s character succeeds in finding love, but at the cost of something a lot bigger. It’s also got some Briarpatch vibes mixed in, where the lead character goes back to the bleak hometown she vowed to escape, and some creepy futurism stuff that reminds us of Devs.

Our Take: Made For Love has a lot of elements that we like that should work better than they do. Milioti is her usual fine-acting self in the episodes we watched, throwing herself into what turns out to be a dual role — Hazel Gogol before her escape, Hazel Green after — even though she’s playing one person. We can see her quiet disdain for her existence in the Gogol compound coagulate into sheer anger when she realizes how much of her life Byron is controlling and how she tries to escape his clutches despite the chip in her brain.

Romano is great as Hazel’s dad Herbert, who has been labeled the town pervert since her mother Lottie (Ione Skye) died. He isn’t just having sex with that real doll, he is having a relationship with it, and takes her everywhere. What part of him got damaged to make him go to that point? We see more of this dynamic in episode 2, as Herbert tries to get his daughter a plane out of the area, but she’s still dogged by the fact that Byron can find her wherever she goes.

But something about the show doesn’t come together. It could be the disjoined timeline, where we’re getting doled out pieces of plot where we see Hazel’s life inside the compound, where she has to be the smiling, supportive wife while seething inside, and then what she’s like when she finally breaks free. We’re not in one of the worlds long enough to really latch onto that part of the story, and we get pulled out just as our interest in that story is piqued. We get the idea that showrunner Christina Lee and her staff wanted to show the contrast of Hazel’s bucolic but fake life inside the compound with her escape, but neither story has time to land with viewers until were onto the other timeline.

It also could be that the story, based on Alissa Nutting’s novel, just feels too cold and dystopian for what we’re looking for. It’s obvious that we’re all sensitive to the idea that social media sites have a dossier on us that is more detailed than we can even imagine; the idea that Hazel is going to run and be “tracked down” is a pretty frightening thought. We’re hoping that the story coalesces into something more funny and less tragic at some point, but right now, it’s a sometimes-funny show that leaves us more cold than anything else.

Sex and Skin: The oral sex scene is pretty hot considering we don’t see anything but Byron’s head between Hazel’s legs. Then, of course, there’s Herbert with the real doll.

Parting Shot: After seeing her dad with the real doll, Hazel passes out.

Sleeper Star: Bakkedahl always kills it in whatever he does, and he’s pretty funny here as Herringbone, who’s only out for himself. Fiffany, played by Noma Dumezweni, is another matter. She’s loyal to Byron… we think.

Most Pilot-y Line: As Alan Speinwall pointed out in Rolling Stone this week, this trend of having a splashy scene to open then flashing back to show how we got there is getting old, as is the fractured timeline method of storytelling.

Our Call: STREAM IT. After looking at the first two episodes, we’re not 100% on board with Made For Love. But Milioti and Romano put in really great work in the series, and have good chemistry with each other. It’s the other elements of the show that we’re not sure about yet.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Made For Love On HBO Max