Modern Love

Modern Love is an irresistible confection of perfectly cast, sensitively written and utterly enjoyable short stories that belie their brevity with deep emotion. [14-27 Oct 2019, p.10]

The world can seem awfully dark and frightening nowadays. Modern Love is here to tell us that now and then it’s fine to sink into a scented bath of unabashed optimism, which is what this opening instalment delivers.

Despite its varying trials and travails, Modern Love strives for an overall feel-good vibe that isn’t always entirely earned. For the most part, it’s gentle on the mind and soothing to the nerves in times when The New York Times front page is a steady drumbeat of downers.

Modern Love’s strongest episodes feature well-defined, believable characters whose eccentricities generate, rather than preclude, a sense of familiarity. ... After episode three, however, Modern Love enters a disappointing lull.

Perhaps most egregiously of all, Modern Love, the television show, sands down the sharp, cutting, and often brutally introspective edges of Modern Love, the column.

Essays are round pegs, and episodes are square holes; few installments of Modern Love carry enough dramatic heft or character work to be worth the effort, and none retain what is so lovely and sharp-edged about the prose that inspired them.

This latest season of “Modern Love” leaves its actors stranded in a barren wasteland bereft of anything remotely true.

The third episode "Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am" is the third episode of a Tv show named "Modern Love." It is about a girl named Lexi (Anne Hathaway) struggling in her relationships with people because she doesn't let them know her story completely. She is diagnosed with bipolar disorder since she was 15, and the only Lexi people get the chance to meet is an energetic girl. But what makes her alone, and keeps people away, sometimes after a short time, is that they don't know about the other part of her life, the part that she is trying to manage through her life but keeps it away from them. When for the first time, she talks about it with a colleague, she describes the feeling as, "an elephant's taken one of its feet off my chest." This episode tries to show both sides of what is to face this condition. We would never totally feel the reality of what happens to a bipolar person, but we see how it affects one's life and relations. How important is it to talk and help each other and let people decide for themselves if they want to stay or leave. Anne Hathaway acts with all her heart, and one laughs and cries with Lexi through the episode. It shows a hopeful path for all of us that through talking and listening, and understanding, we can survive this journey called life.

A host of familiar faces portray a series of mawkish stories that attempt to be post-modern in the world of romcoms. There is nothing new here, they tell us stories about love in terms of passion and not settling for anything less. It just furthers the absurd fantasies of love that emotionally cripple the world at large.

How disappointing that a show named “Modern Love” consists of a bunch of stereotypical white straight couples. One episode is about an older gay couple, but it comes across like a straight person’s stereotype of what gay couples are like. Same with the one interracial couple. There’s nothing modern about this show, it’s not the year 2000 anymore and the creators of this show have shown how out of touch they are with what is modern. Unimaginative, targeted to straight white people. Miss it.