“Modern Love” has branched out from its Manhattan-based anthology of romance and sorrow.
The series, which returned to Amazon Prime for a second season Friday and is based on the New York Times romance column of the same name, still follows the same format: eight star-studded episodes based on a true story, each at a different stage of love.
A widowed doctor (Minnie Driver) balances her new husband and her dead love. Two middle school girls (Lulu Wilson and Grace Edwards) struggle with their sexuality. Divorced couple Tobias Menzies and Sophie Okonedo make their way back to each other at the worst time. A young woman (Dominique Fishback) fights her way out of the friend zone. Two strangers (Lucy Boynton and Kit Harington) find a magnetic attraction on a train at the outset of the pandemic. Gbenga Akinnagbe and Zoe Chao fight daylight. The remnants of a one-night stand diverge years later for Zane Pais and Marquis Rodriguez.
Unlike last season, there’s no wrap-up episode that gives the “Modern Love” characters a happy ending. Most of their stories just end, with more questions than they answer. The intrigue is by design.
“Discovery, beauty, trauma, love, loss can all happen in a flash and can all seem like it lasts forever, but then it goes by in a blink and it’s in the past,” Garrett Hedlund, who stars on an episode with Anna Paquin, told the Daily News. The two play people who become friends after their spouses cheated with their respective mates.
“All you have is now and what happens from now, what happens next, is all a big question.”
Andrew Rannells, who directed an episode based on his own 2017 essay about the night his father died, spoke of the universality of the stories, even his, a very specific New York story about how two halves of a one-night stand remember the evening.
“One of the great things about the series and about the column is you can be from anywhere or be reading it or watching it anywhere and still relate to it,” the 42-year-old actor, who moved to New York from Nebraska when he was 19, told The News.
In another episode, a widow, still clinging to the memories of her late husband, tries to balance her new marriage without forgetting her past. Those memories are tangible: a car that her husband had splurged on and which carried them home from the hospital after their daughter was born now remains her only tie to him.
It isn’t about finding love. It’s losing it and finding it again.
“Remember that grief and loss change you and there are things that you have to move on from, but there are things that you should really take with you,” Driver, 51, told The News. “An understanding that everyone’s relationship to grief is different and being sensitive to that. Love is the great healer.”
Showrunner John Carney has now made 16 episodes of “Modern Love.” Last time, he picked essays that he related to personally. This time, the stories are bigger and broader, young and old, gay and straight. The episodes were made before and after a pandemic that changed everything. But for Carney, love hasn’t changed.
“Do I understand love? No. I understand it less. It’s like whiskey: the more you drink of it the more thirsty you get. The more I read of these columns I read and episodes I make, the more I discuss this with journalists and actors ... nobody will be any the wiser to love. It’s too ethereal, it’s too specific to each person. It’s never the same,” he told The News.
“You take a leap, hold hands and jump off the cliff together. It doesn’t require planning. That’s why dating websites are such a bizarre thing to me, because there has to be an accident. There has to be a leap. There has to be a stroke of luck and weirdness and the stars have to align. You can’t plan for it.”
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