‘Made for Love’s Creators Break Down That Shocking Finale

After eight episodes following Hazel (Cristin Milioti) as she tries to escape her abusive husband, Made for Love ended on perhaps the biggest twist imaginable. Whether you’re a dedicated fan of the book or brand new to this warped world, you won’t be expecting this.

Decider spoke with Made for Love‘s its author, creator, EP, and head wrtier Alissa Nutting as well as its showrunner Christina Lee to break down those unexpected final moments. But don’t worry. Hazel is still on a path for her own independence, and this duo has big plans for her future. They’re just waiting on the Season 2 greenlight from HBO Max. Spoilers ahead for Made for Love Episodes 7 and 8. 

Decider: In the book, when Hazel learns that her father has cancer, she decides to be his caretaker and ignore Byron’s offer to take care of him, but she does the opposite in the show’s finale. She returns to Byron (Billy Magnussen). What made you decide to go in that direction?

Alissa Nutting: I think it really stems from our conceptualization of what we wanted the series to be, who we wanted all of these characters to be in the series. We really wanted to give Hazel a really active journey that still engaged with all of the scenes in the book and also was able to push her relationship with Herbert (Ray Romano) even further than in the book and also collaborated with the actors. They revealed so many different layers of these characters, and we wanted to explore the facets and bonds that were there and really mine those. For kind of a lot of reasons, we wanted to end somewhere spectacular.

Christina Lee: Yeah, and what’s different from the book is you really get into the relationship of Hazel and Byron and the complexities of that. But in attempting to disconnect from Byron here, she reconnects with her father, like in the book. We wanted this choice for her to ultimately choose her father over her own freedom, and we felt like that would lead to more questions and more story.

The final episode definitely feels poised for a second season. Is that something that you’re eyeing?

Nutting: On our end? Yes. We’re waiting to hear.

I want to talk a bit about something you mentioned before — how the actors helped changed the characters. What do you think that Cristin Milioti and Ray Romano brought to Hazel and Herbert that wasn’t originally in the book?

Nutting: One kind of amazing thing about [Milioti’s] performance is she also really wanted to lean into the smaller aspects of this character and not shine away from them. So you really see their dynamic as here are two imperfect individuals who deeply care about each other but are really stubborn and kind of trying to find a way back to each other. Actually, in Cristin’s performance, you see how similar Hazel and her father are in some ways, probably in a lot of ways that the characters themselves wouldn’t see.

Lee: And with Herbert, our initial writing of him was probably a little tougher, rough around the edges. With the casting of Ray, he brought so much humanity to the role and that influenced how we wrote that character. Even when we see him not being a great father, either in the past or present day, we understand it, and we almost have some empathy for him. We truly feel like he’s doing his best, even if sometimes it’s not enough.

Yeah, in the show you definitely get more of Herbert’s journey. It’s touched on in the book, but it’s always through Hazel’s eyes. So you get to feel his independent journey dealing with intimacy. What was developing that arc like?

Lee: I really credit Alissa for that. It was important for her to expand and adapt from the book, because the book was such an internal journey for Hazel. So when we talked about how the show would be different we both agreed that it’d be great to get into the psyche of all the characters and to know where they’re coming from so that none of the characters were villains or victims. Everybody was complicated, that was what we were going for.

Nutting: A huge theme of the show is the sense that you really can’t outline your path, that you can’t escape from who you are or the things that you have not yet dealt with in your own life history. For each of the characters understanding the traumatic places — or their kind of core wounds that impacted some of their behavior, good, but also definitely bad — is a critical aspect of that part of the theme of our show.

One of the things I really love about Made for Love is that, in TV writing, there’s always the safe choice, the unsafe choice, and then Made for Love goes wild into left field every time. What was your favorite sci-fi concept or wild direction to bring to the screen?

Lee: Well, first of all, thank you, that’s a huge compliment. Secondly, I think that when Alissa and I approached this, we wanted to approach sci-fi with a female lens. So what that means for us is that, often we’ve seen women as objects of desire in sci-fi, and while that’s still true for our story, it’s like you’re really following her and you understand what’s going on in her mind as she’s trying to regain her own sense of self and her own brain. This show is high concept. It’s also just about a woman trying to liberate herself from toxic masculinity. We wanted to keep it grounded, but also have those moments that you couldn’t predict.

Nutting: I really loved the idea of watching this secret brain surgery that you’re doing on your wife on the entire roof panel of your home in the sky. That was one of my favorite moments. Even though it’s also probably one of the most problematic, I really liked it.

If you could do anything with this show, how many seasons would you envision?

Lee: We have so much fun on the show. Shooting in a pandemic year created a bond with the cast and crew, and it’s just a pure joy. So I guess the answer to that is as many as they’ll let us.

Nutting: I think the nice thing about this show is that technology isn’t going away anytime soon and neither our relationships, so we kind of have this evergreen content.

Alissa, this is your first big transition from being an author to becoming a TV writer. What have you learned in the process and through Christina?

Nutting: Christina is just kind of the colleague of your dreams. It’s been such a wonderful working partnership, certainly on set and setting the tone. There are so many wonderful leadership skills even outside of television that I learned from her and that I’ll use as my own model for leadership in my career. In writing also, there’s this wonderful opportunity with a visual medium and allowing every sort of character to have some of that kind of objective space on screen. It’s really wonderful to write in the polyphonic way for all of these different points of view that are coming into focus. It feels kind of like getting to write for the entire choir, as opposed to just one singer. It’s the new love of my life.

Watch Made for Love on HBO Max