Review: Modern Love, a rom com revival
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with rom coms, though these days it’s mostly hate. Hate for the insultingly unimaginative, overly engineered potpourri of generic tropes studios spew out each year that try to pass for real stories.
My bar isn’t that high, sometimes I just need emotional comfort food, I crave it like I crave red meat on my period. No matter how cynical I get about the world, charmingly serendipitous love stories acted out by good looking people can be nourishing, and dare I say even healing. But in order for hearts to be warmed, and realities to be escaped we as audiences need to be presented with cohesive stories, not loosely connected plot points designed to cue specific emotional responses.
This is why Amazon Prime’s Modern Love anthology, based on the beloved New York Times column is the welcome incarnation of a familiar genre in new skin. And despite the uneven execution through its eight installments, it does manage to get a few things right.
Let’s talk about the things that make a good rom com. It is, for all intents and purposes, fantasy. Usually set in a gorgeous, idealized version of an aspirational, myth-rich city like New York City of Los Angeles, where weather and daylight are arranged according to the mood of the main characters, where mundane real life struggles such as rent and bills and constipation do not exist except to push the plot forward, where the most important things in the characters’ lives is love, only love. And speaking of the characters, they ought to be idealized, relatable version of us, ordinary but lovely, flawed but good at heart, neurotic but in a cute way, problematic but only because true love is still elusive from an otherwise decent life.
And behold! Modern Love is in fact set entirely in various lovely locales in New York City, from a brownstone with a white gloved door man, to the Bronx Zoo, to a vintage cinema in East Village. In each episode, a different pair of characters navigate the traditional narrative arc of conflict and resolution, the estranged young lovers rekindle their love before an unfortuitous marriage (“When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist”), the bipolar woman finds balance with her illness (“Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am”), the empty nesters rekindle their relationship (“Rallying to Keep the Game Alive”) and everyone comes out a little wiser and with more love in their lives.
When Modern Love works, it runs on sweet earnestness, each coincidence, each leap of faith, is played straight, and grounded by the “based on true stories” foundation of each tale. We can’t help but be reminded of these fantasies are all inspired by real life, and that magic can happen to any of us as well, if we just believed. That’s what I call quality rom com, even those brief moments of suspension of disbelief makes life feel beautiful and full of possibilities.
This is not to say Modern Love is perfectly executed, if anything it is a wobbly step in the right direction in rebooting the rom com genre. The half hour constraint on the storytelling caused a few episodes to resort to clunky, dialogue-driven storytelling that didn’t trust the actors to convey human connections and conflict through non-verbal means. Despite the notable diversity in casting, almost all of the characters who are people of color were relegated to props that were not given their own backstories independent of their role in a main character’s life. And let’s not talk about Episode 6, you should probably skip that one.
I give Modern Love a 3/5 stars, for shaking up a tired genre I still secretly believe in, just like we all secretly believe in love.
