‘Made for Love’ review: Cristin Milioti stars in the latest series tapping into fears about high-tech romance

Last updated Mar 31, 2021

The program starts with a bang, as Milioti’s Hazel Green gets away from the space-age substance she inhabits with Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), the visionary billionaire creator of a tech business called (what else?) Gogol. Byron, it ends up, has actually made Hazel the guinea pig for the business’s most current item, a development called Produced Love, which utilizes implanted microchips to produce “commingled identities. Pure union,” with the upsetting loss of autonomy that suggests.

Hazel’s flight takes her to her eccentric father (Ray Romano), who remains in his own variation of a twisted relationship with a synthetic buddy. The focus is on Hazel and her efforts to take self-reliance, made more difficult by the reality that Byron — thanks to his development — has the ability to track her relocations.

After functions in “How I Met Your Mother” and “Palm Springs,” Milioti has actually appeared poised to break out in a huge method, and this lorry is well fit to profit from her wide-eyed stares, offered the absurdity of Hazel’s circumstance. The tone, by the way, comes quite near to HBO Max’s “The Flight Attendant,” another series with a female lead thrust into serialized danger, and so far among the streaming service’s most total productions.

When It Comes To how Hazel and Byron fulfilled, that slowly comes out through a series of flashbacks (by now a tired gadget), charting the origins of the relationship and pangs of pain that started to emerge even prior to navigating to his distinct rich-guy peculiarities, like getting an early morning swim with his animal dolphin.

Adjusted from Alissa Nutting’s book, the program sometimes feels as if it’s working a little too hard at being over-the-top, from the dollops of violence to the eccentricities of Romano’s character and the not-actually-a-woman in his life.

Still, the half-hour episodes move at a vigorous clip, and there suffices product to plumb — both about how Hazel entered into this mess and how she may go out — to sustain this opening salvo.

“Made for Love” likewise use prompt issues about the tradeoffs associated with innovation — an underlying worry used to the mission for love in the current series “The One” and “Soulmates” — along with how such developments can unscrupulously be utilized to get into personal privacy.

Given, the specific idea and setup may not be developed to last for really long prior to running out of steam; still, if it’s not rather enjoy at very first sight, thanks mainly to Milioti, there’s plenty here to like.

“Made for Love” premieres April 1 on HBO Max, which, like CNN, is a unit of WarnerMedia.

Jobber Wiki author Frank Long contributed to this report.

'Made for Love' review: Cristin Milioti stars in the latest series tapping into fears about high-tech romance - CNN entertainment