Modern Love: Picture Valentine's Day as a Limited Series
Amazon's Modern Love is an anthology series based on the Modern Love New York Times column. The series adapts these stories in a dull presentation. The series follows a woman with an accidental pregnancy, a gay couple who adopt a baby from a homeless woman, a dating app creator and a journalist bonding over lost love and many more stories. The show is filled with a star-studded cast including Anne Hathaway, Andrew Scott, Tina Fey, Dev Patel and more. The show is filled with a romanticized version of love but lacks substance and genuine feeling behind its characters.
Due to its lack of depth it is hard for viewers to connect with the characters in each story. The actors are phenomenal and manage to work with the little material they are given to create some type of development throughout their story. The show relies on the music and montages to fuel development and story. This style gets old shortly after episode two to viewers and sparks them to skip around to episodes worth watching. The show runner does a great job of stripping these individuals from political, class and race influences. They are notably absent from the show and have no influence on the character's love lives.
The show gives off an early 2000s rom-com vibe with its lack of addressing the tough issues and questions. It does have interracial couples but it is important to not that there is at least one white person in each relationship and women of color are missing from the leading role and put into the supporting. It seems like an inaccurate representation of New York in 2019 which makes the show seem like a romanticized dream instead of reality. It is also interesting that the dynamics between the interracial couples are never explored. Even when the main character gets pregnant and considers abortion without saying the word she is nervous about pregnancy for a hot second and then everything works out for her in the end. There is a false light on reality throughout the series.
Each episode examines love at a different stage from second date at a hospital to married with two children and the one that got away. Even self-love is examined through Anne Hathaway's bipolar episode. The takeaway is that love can exist between two people or yourself without being romantic; there are many definitions to the word.
The series finally ends with the most obvious plot line of having all the characters intersect at one point blending all their stories together. Its a cute ending but doesn't draw any conclusions about love. All the character's manage to get a happy endings and whatever happened in their respective episodes is dismissed to serve the purpose of this cleverly staged cliche. It has nothing to say except that love exists all around. There is so much source material to pull from the column but the show doesn't use the complex, messy stories. It results to a shallow message. Love in Modern Love is a Hollywood romance and leaves the pain and complexity of relationships at the door.