That may explain why, in the four episodes provided for review, HBO Max’s Made for Love feels a bit duller than the sharp-edged critiques of tech culture and heterosexual romance in the book. Before father and daughter head out in public together for the first time in her adult life, he warns her: “My reputation has shifted since Diane and I…” “You’re the town pervert now?” Hazel suggests. She ends up at the ramshackle rural home of her estranged dad Herbert ( Ray Romano, in another fun chapter of his late-career Romanossance), whom she discovers in bed with a Loni-Anderson-looking sex doll named Diane. With Byron’s appropriation of her innermost thoughts imminent, Hazel runs, knowing full well that her husband could easily find, capture and kill or at least resume control over her.

Pure union!” Tomorrow, the couple will have their microchips implanted and become, collectively, User 1. The result: “commingled hearts, commingled minds, commingled identities, secrets”-he spits out the word like it’s poison-“dismantled. It’s a we.” What he means is that he’s invented a device that will merge his consciousness with Hazel’s. Her breaking point comes when, at a board meeting for which the Hub is transformed into a lush Japanese garden, Byron announces that “Gogol is not a me anymore. It isn’t exactly satisfying, but then, neither was her old life. A decade into her stay in this sterile, creepily scentless place, everything from Hazel’s food intake to her sexual response has been quantified. Every aspect of life at the Hub has been calibrated to his specifications. One episode opens with a TV news segment on the Gogols, which Byron spontaneously starts directing when Hazel ventures off-script.

He is, first and foremost, a control freak. She left behind not just her education, but also her friends and family to live with him at the Hub-an isolated sort of shape-shifting luxury home and tech campus that can be programmed to resemble any place in the world.īyron comes off as an amalgam of several different tech titans he has Musk’s awkward bravado, Bezos’ supercharged physique, Mark Zuckerberg’s disregard for others’ privacy, Peter Thiel’s eerie transhumanism. Played by Cristin Milioti in a lovably self-destructive performance that recalls her messy, time-looping maid of honor role in Palm Springs, Hazel was still a college student running minor scams to pay bills when the billionaire inventor Byron Gogol ( Game Night‘s Billy Magnussen) proposed to her midway through a surreal first date that should have raised some red flags. Hazel Gogol, née Green, the protagonist of HBO Max’s odd, enjoyable but somewhat slight Made for Love, is one of these women.

Made for love by alissa nutting