In theory, a series based on “Modern Love,” the wildly popular “New York Times” column about real life relationships, is a slam dunk. There’s no shortage of material, …
, whose meditations on the equally hard and rewarding slog of marriage in “Catastrophe” remain some of TV’s best. Horgan, unlike Carney, doesn’t take the source material too literally. She instead fills in the gaps with subtle threads of disdain that eventually reveal a rich tapestry of gnarled resentment, culminating in a pointed monologue about all the ways a partner can make the other feel vanishingly small.
Watching this episode makes the shortcomings of the others even clearer and more frustrating. The premiere refuses to shade out its original story, an especially egregious oversight when it comes to the omnipresent doorman who could, in a TV show, have far more depth than he does in the column. Patel and Keener spark onscreen together despite the paint-by-numbers script bonding them .
For all the wasted opportunities of biggest failure of “Modern Love,” however, belongs to its most ambitious. In “Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am,” Hathaway stars as Lexi, a bipolar woman who’s struggled all her life to balance her manic episodes with her depressive ones. Carney’s episode hews remarkably close to the trajectory of Terri Cheney’s original 2008 column to the point where Lexi, in writing herself a candid dating profile, essentially re-writes the column.
And it’s a shame. Again: The concept of turning “Modern Love” into an anthology series is a good one with a low difficulty setting. With the source material and acting talent at its disposal, this series could have dug a little deeper to find some fresh ways to unravel all the ways that love can make us happy, hurt, and even grow. Instead, it serves up plate after plate of lukewarm leftovers that are somehow never filling.
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