Author Spotlight
Sarah Bledsoe
Rolling my eyes at the latest boy ghosting me on Snapchat, I turned on the TV and put on something, anything, that would make me believe in love again. Okay, that was a little dramatic. But you get the point.
After a 15-minute search through Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Video, I finally found my answer: “Modern Love.”
“Modern Love” is an Amazon Prime original based on the weekly column published in The New York Times that reports a new love story each issue. So, each episode is loosely based on a true story of two people. The show follows a total of eight stories on the trials and tribulations of love.
The episodes range from love at first sight to rediscovering love in a lifeless marriage. There are even stories about the stress of adoption and rekindling an old romance.
However, the variation of love stories presented leaves the audience with a lack of depth and understanding. I mean, come on — it took “The Office” four seasons for Jim and Pam to go on a date. But somehow, the “Modern Love” producers expect me to fall in love with the individuals, root for their romance and watch them live happily ever after in only 30 minutes.
The first episode starts off with a young woman struggling to find ‘the one,’ and she brings home a lot of different men, all of whom her doorman-turned-best-friend disapproved. The doorman represented the father figure she never knew she needed — which definitely made my dad tear up while watching. She ends up getting knocked up and feeling all alone until the doorman, Guzmin, helps watch the baby. But sadly, she ends up moving to LA before flying back five years later with a new man she finally fell in love with. And all that was just one episode of “Modern Love.”
The next story followed a tech genius who lost his first love and reminisces about past loves, all during an “off-the-record” interview with a newspaper journalist. After he talked about the love of his life cheating on him and leaving, we learn the journalist has a complex relationship with love as well. Apparently she had a steamy romance with a military man, but of course they got separated and now live completely different lives. Yet, they come together in the end.
While I watched these crazy love stories, I realized that my mundane life of school and policy debate needs to be spiced up. I quickly learned that a lot of the “Modern Love” episodes depicted loveless marriages where the spouses pined for their first love — I mean, no wonder 50% of marriages end in a divorce.
The show also touched on important issues like hardships of adoption, especially for same-sex couples, what life is like below the poverty line and true happiness coming from who you surround yourself with. In the episode “Hers was a World of One,” a free-spirited woman — homeless by choice — gets pregnant and decides to put up her child for adoption to a loving couple. It looked at love in every light, not just what society says is right.
While I think the idea of the TV show was obviously adorable and I enjoyed learning about different love stories, there wasn’t any longevity. Just as I would get interested in a couple and the final scene would play moments before the couple would kiss, the show was over. That being said, at least the show didn’t do any major damage to my bank account. The only cost required was the nine dollars a month we, and by we, I mean my parents, pay for the Amazon Prime membership.
The show is also perfect for either an entire season binge or watching one episode a month — it’s really a take-it-how-you-want-it situation. Because each episode had a different plot with different characters, it was easy to skip around and watch whatever episode my heart desired. It was also easy to multitask — it doesn’t require my full attention to find out that the couple will be together at the end yet again.
The only episode that actually took me by surprise was “Take Me as I Am, Whoever I Am,” which starred Anne Hathaway, who played a woman who spent her whole life hiding her bipolar disorder. When she meets a boy in a supermarket during one of her good days, she immediately falls in love.
But by the time of their date on Thursday, she’s back in bed, unable to even fathom going on a date, no matter how much she loves him. The story felt so real that I ached to be by her side and tell her everything is going to be okay. She spends the whole episode fighting with herself to get this boy to love her; but, in the end, learns that she can only grow if she accepts herself.
She realizes this by breaking down in a diner to her work friend who takes her for who she is. This just further enforced the universal truths that you don’t need a man and honesty is the best policy. Now I’m not usually a fan of shows telling me how to live my life, but “Modern Love’s” subtle approach made me smile when the good guy always prevailed.
In the end, I learned a lot about love in my four-hour binge. I discovered that “Modern Love” could have easily broken up each episode into different seasons and I realized that I truly am a sucker for a good romantic comedy. But nevertheless, when season two comes out in 2020, I will be the first to pop some popcorn and waste a whole Sunday consumed by the love lives of others.
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