Modern Love
モダン・ラブ 〜今日もNYの街角で〜
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Anthology from the newspaper column; the doorman episode alone is a lesson in non-romantic love.
Each half-hour episode adapts a reader's essay from the New York Times column Modern Love; each tells a different kind of love, most of them in New York.
In the first season Maggie, dating around Manhattan, is watched over by her building's doorman, Guzmin, who disapproves of her men; when she becomes pregnant and single he sees her through it, and years later she brings her daughter and a new boyfriend back for his approval. Joshua, the young founder of a dating app, tells a journalist, Julie, about the woman he left after she confessed to sleeping with her ex; Julie sends him back to her. Lexi, writing a dating profile, remembers how hiding her bipolar disorder ended a relationship, and decides to say it first. Sarah and Dennis spend six months in couples therapy deciding to separate, then finally talk honestly over dinner, and two years on they are still together. Yasmine and Rob spend their second date in a hospital after he cuts his arm, and by morning they know each other. Maddy, who grew up without a father, finds one in an older colleague, Peter, and is hurt when he tries to kiss her; they part kindly. Tobin and Andy take in Karla, a homeless young woman whose baby they will adopt, and Tobin stays at her side through the birth. Margot leaves the funeral of Kenji, the fellow runner she loved late in life, and runs past the couples of the earlier episodes.
In the second season, Stephanie reluctantly sells the old sports car in which she still feels close to her dead first husband, and her second husband buys it back. Zoe, whose body clock runs through the night, and Jordan break up over it and try again. Paula and Michael meet on a train to Dublin as lockdown begins and promise to meet when it lifts; he finds her street and waits. Lil, a comedian, sleeps with Vince, her best friend since middle school, in college, hears him call it a mistake, and only reconciles with him years later at her show. Katie, in middle school, falls for her classmate Alexa, and the two decide to give it a try. Spence, a former Marine whose wife is having an affair, falls for Isabelle, the ex-wife of his wife's lover, and after one false parting they get together. Ben and Robbie pass on a street, remember the one date they had years before, and walk on. Elizabeth and Van, divorced, are finding their way back when she learns she has breast cancer; she turns down his proposal, then admits she would have said yes, and they face her treatment together.
Starring
Cristin Miliotias Maggie
A young woman in Manhattan whose doorman becomes the steadiest man in her life through dating, pregnancy and motherhood.
Maggie’s story
Maggie lives alone in a smart Manhattan building that came to her through her family, and dates widely. Each night her doorman, Guzmin, looks over the man she brings home and lets her know when he disapproves; she thinks he never gets it right. When she finds herself pregnant, the man she briefly dated wants no part of it, and she goes ahead alone. Guzmin sees her through the pregnancy and her daughter's first years, and when a job takes her to Los Angeles he tells her to go. Years later she brings her daughter and a new boyfriend back to New York. Guzmin tells the man he has passed, then whispers to Maggie that he was never looking at the men, only at her eyes.
Dev Patelas Joshua
The founder of a dating app who admits to a journalist that he let the one real love of his life go.
Joshua’s story
Joshua is promoting his dating app to a journalist, Julie, when she asks whether he has ever been in love. He tells her about Emma, whom he met at a job interview and waited for outside to ask out: trips to the zoo, moving in together, a ring put away for the right moment. Then one night Emma came home upset and confessed she had slept with her ex, and he packed and left. Since then he has dated one woman after another without feeling anything; Emma is engaged now, he says, though he could have forgiven her. Julie answers with the story of the first love she lost, urges him to go after Emma and puts his story in her article. Emma reads it, breaks off her engagement, and she and Joshua are together again.
Anne Hathawayas Lexi
A woman with bipolar disorder who has hidden her highs and lows from the people she dates.
Lexi’s story
Filling in a dating profile, Lexi looks back. On a high she dances through a supermarket and gets a date with Jeff, but by the night of the date she has sunk into a low and can barely get through it, and Jeff assumes she came only out of politeness. Up again, she invites him to dinner and spends the day cooking and cleaning, but as he rings the bell the dark returns and she cannot get up from the bathroom floor. Her absences cost her her job. Over coffee with the manager who let her go, she says for the first time that she has bipolar disorder, and gains a friend. With treatment, she finishes the profile by saying it at the start.
Tina Feyas Sarah
A wife and mother in couples therapy, deciding whether a long marriage to Dennis can be saved.
Sarah’s story
Sarah and her husband, Dennis, an actor, have spent six months in weekly couples therapy, and she suspects they are staying together only until their children leave home. On the therapist's advice they take up tennis, and Dennis plays by rules of his own. He leaves her standing across the road to greet Hollywood executives and lets a fan interrupt a family meal. On the day they agree in therapy that the marriage is over, they go for a meal, and Sarah finally tells him that she hates who she has become around him, that he leaves her out and has arranged their life so they share nothing. He agrees and apologises. Two years later they are still married, and on the tennis court they both keep to the rules.
Minnie Driveras Stephanie Curran
A remarried woman who cannot part with the old car that keeps her first, late husband close.
Kit Haringtonas Michael
A man who meets Paula on a train to Dublin as lockdown begins, and promises to see her when it ends.
Why it matters
Modern Love takes its title seriously in one respect: love, in these stories, is not only romance. A doorman who acts as a father, a young woman looking for the father she lost, a couple adopting the baby of a homeless stranger, a widow who cannot sell her dead husband's car, a woman deciding to name her bipolar disorder at the start: the series keeps widening the word until it covers care, grief, illness and friendship. Drawn from readers' essays in the New York Times, it is gentler than the lives it adapts, and critics said so, particularly of the second season, which Rotten Tomatoes' consensus found fonder of romantic cliché than of its source's complicated truths. It travelled well: Prime Video made local versions, among them Modern Love Tokyo in 2022. What it leaves is a modest, real question: whom a person is allowed to love, and in what shape.