Modern Love review – vapid, nauseating ... and that's before Ed Sheeran shows up

The New York Times’ Modern Love column, a weekly first-person essay about love and relationships, is such an institution that it is a wonder it has taken so long to make a series out of it. It has already been spun off into a very good podcast, with the stories read by big-name stars. But Modern Love (Amazon Prime) for television continues the streaming giant’s run of so-so dramas that can’t quite break new ground. This should be a surefire success. It’s A-list and painfully classy, but over eight episodes it only rarely lifts off, and instead settles into an oddly bland, will-this-do middle ground.

I expected something along the lines of Easy, another half-hour anthology show about love and relationships. Easy was – well – easy to love, though this is far more wholesome. If Easy is a 4am taxi back to a stranger’s house after a big night out, Modern Love is an afternoon coffee, but just one, because you both have somewhere else you would rather be. Its eight episodes follow lovestruck or lovelorn New Yorkers, and while it is mostly about romantic love, it has a healthy respect for the power of supportive friends and family, too. The first episode is about a doorman’s years-long paternal affection for a woman who lives in the apartment building where he works; a later instalment is about a first date that ends up in a trip to the hospital. Episodes are pleasant, if slight, and if you’ve seen any film about finding love in New York from the past 30 years, will feel very familiar.

One of the biggest draws is episode three – Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am– in which Anne Hathaway plays Lexi, a lawyer with bipolar disorder struggling to manage her highs and lows. It is by far the most distinctive of the eight, and views mental illness through an ambitiously theatrical lens. When she is manic, Lexi is a Rita Hayworth-esque bombshell who craves peaches in the middle of the night and charms men in the supermarket into having breakfast with her. When she is low, she can barely get out of bed and can only bring herself to eat muesli. John Carney, who executive produced the series and directs most of the episodes, has turned it into a sort of musical, with My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend flourishes and a joke about La La Land. Strange, then, that it is the stripped back scenes that ring most true: it finds its emotional core in a scene in a diner, with two women deciding simply to become friends. The razzle-dazzle window-dressing feels extraneous, with Hathaway’s performance at its best when it is quietest.

There are two episodes that prove exceptions to Modern Love’s mostly saccharine and straightforward worldview, and both have moments of honesty that feel authentic rather than stagey. When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist (I do not recognise this description of journalists) sees Dev Patel play a tech mogul who invented a dating site, while Catherine Keener is a writer sent to profile him. She asks him if he has ever been in love; they end up swapping stories about the one who got away. It nails the romance perfectly, in part because they are a great platonic pairing, but also because it allows each story to take a different path. One is fairytale, the other stoic. It is the episode that packs in the elegance you suspect they were reaching for elsewhere, and its finale is a genuine tearjerker.

The other standout, Rallying to Keep the Game Alive, adds some much needed vinegar. Written and directed by Sharon Horgan, it stars Tina Fey and John Slattery as a long-married couple with two teenage children who are wondering why they’re still together. They watch a film about penguins, and wonder what the point of long-term love is; they go to couples’ therapy, and bicker their way through it, grasping impatiently for some common ground. (A line about whether cooking can be a hobby is the finest in the whole series.) Eventually, they settle on vicious, rule-breaking tennis. It is the least sentimental episode, and by far the best.

Though they are based on true essays, the rest of the stories have a peculiar veneer of fantasy to them. As an occasional indulgence, it’s sweet, but over eight episodes, it becomes sickly. That is to say nothing of its insistence on adding to the inexplicably long list of Ed Sheeran cameos out there in the world. Overall, the feeling is one of anecdotes that have been told over and over until they have been smoothed into one familiar shape, losing all of the rough, awkward edges of what actually happened over time. Advice for anyone reading who might be interested in making a series out of the Guardian’s own Blind Date: the one with the house party and the left-behind knickers might have just enough bite.