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Amazon’s take on the New York Times cult column is warm, A-list touting and just a little bit exactly like Netflix’s Easy
Hope you like Ed Sheeran acting because Ed Sheeran is acting, here, in this. You thought you could escape Sheeran for a second, didn’t you? You fool. “I don’t personally like the music of Ed Sheeran,” you think to yourself, as if it were as easy as that. “I simply avoid his concerts and thus commit myself to a life of not looking at his little Megabus Man face.” But oh, look, no: here’s his skin on a ketchup bottle. Oh, look, no: he’s in Game of Thrones, singing. And oh, look, no: for absolutely no reason at all, he’s been stunt-cast in Modern Love, doing a calamitous Irish accent and derailing an entire scene because he is Ed Sheeran, and we live in a world where Ed Sheeran is allowed to do what he wants, and that includes ruining a perfectly serviceable Amazon Prime series about love because he was vaguely in the area while it was filming.
So Modern Love (from Thursday 17 October, Amazon Prime Video) is this: it’s the Netflix series Easy, but it’s made instead for Amazon Prime. That is simply it. Nominally, it is a series based on the New York Times column, where reader-contributors file a column a week to build a picture of the intricate and unusual dating scene we have in 2019 (a difficult relationship with your pregnancy surrogate! A weird sexual/non-sexual relationship with a work dad! Platonic love with your apartment doorman!). It’s all of that, yes, but it is also the Netflix series Easy, made instead for Amazon Prime. If you have not seen Easy, it’s a show where people fall in love with spiky difficulty while Dave Franco is literally always yelling about IPA. Switch him out for Anne Hathaway having a breakdown and it is more or less the same show. Continue reading...