Modern Love (TV Series), Love in Small Bites

I love December weather. The sun is always hiding behind a parade of dark clouds, the temperature drops to the middle 20s and it’s the one time in a year you won’t look out of sorts in a sweater. When it is this time of the year, I like to snuggle in front of my fireplace. Of course, no true blue Singaporean has a fireplace because it would look like the dumbest thing ever. My “fireplace” is my telly and Amazon Prime’s anthology series Modern Love is the perfect “fire” as this horrid year winds down.

Just the other night we entertained some lovely guests and they chose to watch When Harry Met Sally… (1989); they made a wise choice. Remember how the movie is interspersed with candid segments of married couples sharing stories of how they met? Modern Love is kinda if someone made a short film of those lovely stories and the “someone” is John Carney, the man behind probably the best trilogy of music films – Once (2007), Begin Again (2013) & Sing Street (2016) – ever made.

Modern Love is based on the New York Times’ column that explores relationships, love and the human connection. This is love in all its combies, permutations and guises – an unlikely friendship, a lost love resurfaced, a marriage at its turning point, a date that might not have been a date, an unconventional new family. These are unique stories about the joys and tribulations of love, each inspired by a real-life personal essay from the beloved New York Times column “Modern Love.”

At a run-time of not longer than 30 minutes, none of the stories overstayed their welcome and this is economical storytelling at its best. That’s not to say they don’t hit the spot. I love that the stories are not just about romantic love. The game plan here is not about a meeting of lips or a tessellation of two bodies, but to look at different kinds of love.

It opens with a strong episode about a platonic friendship between a girl and a doorman. It ends with one of the beautiful lines ever spoken by the doorman, kinda like the tears inducer “I see you” line from The Joy Luck Club (1993).

The second episode takes a two-pronged narrative approach to tell a story about missed chances. This one made me a teary wreck. It managed to do so much in 30 minutes than most 90-minute movies.

The third episode was a surprise and a poignant look at a young woman suffering from Bipolar. A couple of months ago, I was teaching a Secondary Three class about mental illnesses and if I had seen this earlier I would have screened this for the kids. Nothing hits us better than gorgeous narratives like this. This episode is also a great reminder that to love others we must first love ourselves. A gem of an episode. 

The fourth episode is about the ebb and flow of a marriage when the kids are leaving the nest, and it’s about reconnecting. Love it.

I will leave you to discover the rest, but I will just say it closes out with a great one about old love being the same as young love, another gem. It is a nice way to end the anthology but the narrative takes a nice turn to close out all the preceding stories beautifully, a poignant icing on an eight-tiered cake.

Modern Love is a mixed bag; some stories are more memorable than others, but taken as a whole it is perfectly entertaining, presenting a complex theme in a relatable way. This is the perfect comfort food as the frightful year bids us goodbye.

Written by Daniel Chiam