One day, Modern Love might find the one. Amazon’s anthology of standalone half-hour romantic dramas based on the New York Times column of real stories – not that it would change anything if it were fiction – feels like a format that could scrape soft barbs across your soul at any moment. Watching the second season make another eight stuttering attempts at the sublime, though, is to experience how rarely stars align.
At its best, Modern Love has emotional heft because, yes, we once felt that too. In How Do You Remember Me?, Zane Pais and Marquis Rodriguez are two guys whose one night together was ended by circumstance. Some time later, they catch sight of each other in the street. As they step closer and closer, a Rashomon-style tale of small gestures and big mistakes plays out, each of them remembering the fateful evening from their own perspective. Writer-director Andrew Rannells conveys the sweet regret of a near miss, and the way lost moments are replayed and reshaped in the mind.
The high-school drama Am I…? Maybe This Quiz Will Tell Me (this show loves its prolix episode titles) stars Lulu Wilson as a girl discovering herself and her desires amid a clatter of overlapping dialogue and breathless running through corridors. It doesn’t amount to enough, ultimately, but it did cause dormant valves in my heart to flicker.
Although this series of Modern Love is more diverse and adventurous than the first run, which was justly criticised for spending too long in a comfortable, stylised New York, the metropolitan whimsy hasn’t entirely gone away. It is present in The Night Girl, a tale of two fusspots trying to overcome the fact that one of them prefers to sleep all day and roam the city at night. The underlying metaphor, about letting a potential partner into our peculiar bubble, doesn’t compensate for a story that is largely about a couple failing to organise brunch. Other duds are an episode about a friendship threatened by unrequited love – we haven’t time to do the complexities of that particular gut-punch justice – and a plain bizarre one with Garrett Hedlund as a soldier whose PTSD manifests as a halting affection for Anna Paquin, whose husband his own wife had an affair with.
In the three episodes where showrunner John Carney – best known for Once and Sing Street – takes over as writer and/or director, Modern Love retreats to safer territory and becomes more about romance movies than romance itself. Strangers on a (Dublin) Train both uses and satirises the romcom “meet cute”, as bookish Lucy Boynton and charming Kit Harington – their characters seemingly half-aware that they’ve been created for our entertainment – fall rapidly in love just before lockdown prevents them pursuing it. But the lack of an ending means we take nothing from it: when the half-hour is up, the story just stops, provoking the is-that-it shrug that follows too many of these episodes.
Another Carney-directed effort features Sophie Okonedo and Tobias Menzies as divorced parents in a shamelessly romcommy London who might get back together. The pair are almost irresistibly likable – but that only draws attention to the mystery of why on earth they gave up on their film-worthy chemistry in the first place.
Closest to the bullseye is On a Serpentine Road, With the Top Down (I’m sorry, but these titles appear on the screen) in which a typically twinkly Minnie Driver plays a woman who, whenever she gets in her temperamental old sports car, talks to someone who isn’t there. Only a late blast of overwritten sentimentality taints what would otherwise be this show’s ideal: an idea too small and light for a 90-minute movie but too precious to be let go.
That zone between glorious fantasy and saccharine indulgence is fearsomely narrow. Will Modern Love ever get there? It needs to drop its kooky mannerisms, perhaps be less hung up on A-list performers, and be brave enough to spend 30 minutes saying something pure with its whole chest. Until then, the search goes on.
