It’s a certain kind of man who can rob the female orgasm of joy through data mining, and in HBO Max’s “Made for Love,” that man is Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), entrepreneur, tech genius, and serial creep. After coating the world in screens designed to connect consumers but intended to surveil them, he’s sorta kinda almost perfected his masterpiece, also called Made For Love. It’s a microchip. The chip goes into your brain. Another chip goes into your better half’s brain. Suddenly you’re both mind-melded, and neither of you has secrets from the other anymore. There’s a way to sell this product as romantic. “Made for Love,” the show, has no interest in romance. Frankly, neither does Byron. He’s a control freak. In his way, he’s a prison warden, too.
So the series opens with Hazel Green-Gogol (Cristin Milioti) busting out of a water tank concealed beneath desert sands. She and Byron are married. She’s his guinea pig. Without either her knowledge or permission, Byron slipped her the chip, and if she wasn’t entertaining dreams of escape before then, she certainly would’ve after. Because this is a Milioti-centric show, Hazel immediately slips back into the drink and the tank’s lid bonks her on the noggin, but “Made for Love” isn’t purely comic. Largely, it’s unnerving, and altogether too real. Big tech knows what you’re thinking and what you want at all times. (I, for instance, took a regrettable ten-minute browse on Deep Discount, and now, every site I visit barrages me with ads promising savings on products I don’t even want.) Gogol’s aspiration is to truly know what’s going on under the surface of all man, though his foremost goal, of course, is to possess Hazel.
The show, adapted from Alissa Nutting’s novel and produced by the author, as well as S.J. Clarkson, Liza Chasin, Dean Bakopoulos, and Patrick Somerville, is spurred by a toxic man’s insane need to control a woman’s body via constant monitoring. Hazel’s whole life in the compound Byron calls home, “the Hub,” a curated facsimile of the real world so utterly convincing and so fungible that you might find yourself in their backyard one second and the African coast the next, is scheduled: Her sex with Byron is on a timetable, she has regular naps on her calendar, post-coitus review sessions with a truly awkward Gogol goon, und so weiter und so fort. That ain’t living. It’s a prison sentence. “Made for Love”s dramatizing of Hazel’s literal internment mimics the effect tech has on us regular schmucks out here, under endless vigil by the devices we hold so dear that days without them are unimaginable. How do we get by if we can’t yell at each other on Twitter with just a few taps of a touchscreen? How could we manage if we couldn’t just reach into our pockets and order burritos using one form of rapacious food delivery apps?
We’re too dependent on our gear, which makes Hazel’s self-liberation, literalized with tongue firmly in cheek by the series’ creators, a wish-fulfillment fantasy. “Made for Love” advocates reduced reliance on and investment in technology that convince us we’re happy but forces us into relationships that actually dampen happiness: With the uncaring corporations pushing the technology, with third party entities brought to our doorsteps by said uncaring corporations, with the government, and frankly with each other, because even a positive interaction on social media can corrode the soul. Nothing beats the real thing. But “Made for Love,” apart from a screed against making digital whoopee with tech products, thinks deeply about what it even is to love and to be in love. There’s a reason that love is the show’s centerpiece. It isn’t just to make portraiture of toxic manhood.
Love is unquantifiable. It’s an experience unique to each person. What Byron defines as “love,” for instance, is actually abuse, even if he doesn’t recognize it as such or consider his smothering tactics as abusive. It’s easy to see why he’s able to sweep Hazel off her feet at first: His godlike command over the world by way of his virtual reality tech, which whisks her away from a college campus to Europe for their first date, is totally intoxicating, because who can ignore the summons of a god? Didn’t really work for ladies in Greek mythology, and Zeus isn’t as hunky or handsome as Byron. (Casting Magnussen, who may or may not be a golden retriever made into a man, is a stroke of genius.) But like Zeus, Byron’s interest isn’t in his paramour. It’s in what his paramour can provide him. Hazel is a flesh and blood font of information. Maybe, on some level, Byron really does care about her thoughts and feelings, but regardless, he uses them for his own ends instead of letting them simply be. That’s not love.
Elsewhere on the spectrum, there’s Herbert (Ray Romano, a guy who in the latter phase of his career keeps popping up in unexpected, complex, and occasionally plain old fucking weird roles), Hazel’s dad, a widower who likely would’ve been a divorcé had Hazel’s mom not succumbed to cancer years prior. In the narrative’s present, he still dwells in the ramshackle desert abode where Hazel grew up; he’s also kept company by a sex doll slash synthetic partner, Diane, which gets him labeled a pervert by what few neighbors he has in the middle of Nowhere, America. What he has is unconventional. At the same time it’s by far more real than what Hazel had with Byron, or technically still has, because the chip is a tracking device and Byron is hellbent on reacquiring her. There’s a degree of control even in Herbert’s dynamic with Diane, because she’s, y’know, a doll, but he still stands up for her, which is more than Byron does for Hazel.
But Hazel’s capable of sticking up for herself, and Milioti is perhaps the perfect choice for a woman this self-possessed in a comedy this dark. As always, she communicates humor through her eyes, and through taut, motionless facial expressions; there’s a sense that even when she’s still she’s in irritable motion. And then she chops Dan Bakkedahl’s fingers off with a fire ax or blasts his foot with a shotgun, and the inertia disappears to be replaced by hilarious panic. “Made for Live” likely doesn’t work without her sensibilities as an actress, nor without directors Alethea Jones and Stephanie Laing’s joint knack for making grim futurism funny. Even brief fuzzed-up flashes of pixelation, dead giveaways of Byron’s imperfect (but close to it) artifice, invite at least a chuckle. God is fallible. But fallible or not, he has the power to create and the power to destroy. Fortunately, Hazel has power of her own, and “Made for Love” lets her slowly come into it across its first four episodes. Where that journey takes her is another story, but the amount of thought put into plot, theme, and performance makes the opening half of “Made for Love” absorbing viewing. [B]
“Made for Love” debuts on HBO Max on April 1.
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