Post: Modern

Anthology TV shows are so often the province of science fiction. From Black Mirror to The Twilight Zone to The Outer Limits to Amazing Stories (and the revivals of most of them), there are plenty of ways to get a compact tale of the bizarre -- especially if you like it bleak. But bleak isn't for everyone, especially now. Which made a different kind of anthology series particularly welcome.

Modern Love is an Amazon Prime series created by John Carney. Odds are you haven't heard of him. In fact, odds are you've never seen any of his movies -- though I have praised his most recent, Sing Street, here on my blog. If you have seen Sing Street, though, you might imagine (like I did) that Carney might be just the person to bring audiences this type of show. Modern Love is a series of stand-alone romantic tales inspired by columns published in The New York Times. The opening credits make clear that the series is going to cast a wide net in the stories it tells: featuring young people and old, many ethnicities, straight couples and gay, tales of romantic love and others of profound friendship, people finding each other or drifting apart, stories happy and sad and bittersweet. Each episode is, simply, half an hour about love.

Each of season one's eight episodes (and the series has been renewed for another season) features different actors. As a whole, it's an impressive lineup, and often the romantic pairings are well cast. Episodes feature Catherine Keener, Dev Patel, Gary Carr, Tina Fey, John Slattery, John Gallagher Jr., Andrew Scott, Olivia Cooke, and Jane Alexander, among many others. I wouldn't have thought John Carney the sort of person with a huge contact list to just open up, but one way or another, some great performers turned out for this show.

Though I found something to like about every episode, I did have some personal favorites. The first episode, "When the Doorman Is Your Main Man" is a great way to begin the series; it stars Cristin Milioti (of How I Met Your Mother) in a sweet tale that shows right out of the gate that the relationships this show examines won't always be purely romantic ones. The third episode, "Take Me as I Am, Whoever I Am" features Anne Hathaway in a bold performance as a woman dealing with intense bipolar disorder; the episode captures the high highs and low lows in a powerful way.

The episodes don't trend as "com" as standard "rom-com," which I think made me like them more. Still, I'd say they're not so heavy to put off any fan of the genre. Imagine the separate story lines of Love Actually, each pulled apart into their own 30-minute episode -- that's Modern Love. It's certainly easy enough to try one and see whether you like it or not -- there's no grand commitment as with so many shows worth watching these days. And it being on Amazon Prime, odds are sampling Modern Love won't mean convincing you to try some new upstart's streaming service with not-enough-content-yet-to-be-worthwhile.

I give Modern Love a B+ overall (with both stronger and weaker episodes than that, individually). The series certainly isn't as buzzed about as other streaming phenoms these days -- or even other shows on Amazon Prime -- but I think it's worth checking out.