As a premise for comedy goes this one’s certainly pushing the envelope. HBO MAX’s Made For Love sees Hazel, married to possessive tech billionaire Bryan Gogol (see what they did there?), have a chip planted in her brain whereby he can see, hear and feel everything she does. It’s the ultimate stalker scenario. 

How we laughed. Or not.

I love a mash-up as much as the next potato, and I have no problem with comedy taking on the darkest of subjects, but the stalking of a woman by her sociopathic husband struggles to find its funny when played for screwball laughs. I can’t quite tell if the gags just aren’t landing or it’s the context that makes them fall so flat. Perhaps it’s bad timing. Attitudes to domestic abuse and gender relationships have shifted over recent years and it may be that Made For Love thinks it is addressing those social changes, but after #MeToo and recent news stories in the UK, shining the spotlight on violence against women, it feels jarringly tone deaf.

Plus, it’s a show that knows it’s out of balance. Alternating the quirky screwball set-pieces come ‘serious’ scenes… and then back to the comedy. This viewer started to feel stylistically seasick as it lurched from genre to genre, mood to mood, never quite fusing the two. Cristin Milioti does her best with Hazel but it’s a manic performance full of ‘comedy’ gurning that makes it hard to really engage with her, as if she’s trying to ‘will’ the series into making some kind of emotional sense.

Ray Romano as her loving but loser dad is the one cast member in the first two episodes to feel like any kind of anchor. He simply plays his own character – truthfully – without any meta awareness of the concept – which is what they all need to do if this series is going both to touch our hearts and make us laugh.

Verdict: On the basis of these series openers it’s either a worthy failure, or a show that might grow into something more interesting and nuanced, so it’s worth a look, but this reviewer found it hard to care – certainly not enough to watch a third episode. 6/10

Martin Jameson