We all are familiar with the superhero comic book that becomes a movie franchise. That transition is a well-travelled road, with familiar potholes (bad sequels) along the way. There are endless brand extensions into toys, lunch boxes, backpacks, pajamas, and even vitamin gummies.
But it's rare for a newspaper column about relationships to make the leap into streaming TV and podcasts. There are no capes, superpowers, or master villains. But in relationships, the superpower may be the ability to sustain a relationship despite the roadblocks life throws up in front of us. The master villain in a relationship is often us. We sabotage the relationship, pick the wrong person again and again, or convince ourselves we can fix this person and live happily ever after.
That's the improbable journey of Modern Love.
"Modern Love" is a column published in The New York Times that was started in 2004. It appears in the Style section on Sundays. The popular column then gave birth to an Amazon Prime anthology streaming TV series in premiering in October 2019 and a podcast beginning that same year.
The Modern Love show on Amazon Prime became one of Amazon's few TV hits at the time, and a second season was ordered and released in late summer 2021. Some of my favorite episodes included "When The Doorman Is Your Main Man" in season one, about a young woman who bonds with her New York City doorman after an unexpected pregnancy. Also, that season, Anne Hathaway starred and excelled in an episode about a bipolar woman who struggles to find love riding the waves of the highs and lows of her illness.
In season two, Minnie Driver excels as a British general practice doctor who is loath to sell a vintage 30-year car that is her strong connection to her late husband who died of cancer
Modern Love, the podcast began in 2019. For the first two years, the podcast had a format whereby a celebrity read a column. Notables such as Zoe Lister-Jones, Issa Rae, Regina King, and Zachary Quinto read essays from the column. Then in October 2020, the podcast received plastic surgery, with a host replacing the celebrities reading columns and a more dramatic narrative of stories of relationships from the column.
In early 2022, the present host Anna Martin joined the podcast and the format and the show has never been stronger
This season of Modern Love explored love in all its messy, complicated forms — including stories about star-crossed lovers in their 60s, the best nanny in all of New York City and an adoptee who overturns her assumptions about her mother.
On the season finale, host Anna Martin introduces listeners to one woman’s story about forgiveness after her ex-husband became terminally ill, and checks in with the woman’s now 16-year-old son to reflect on the impact of his mother’s decision.
All 10 episodes of this season are out now.
Check out the column, the podcast, and the show. All three unravel the mystical properties of relationships, eschewing the fairy-tale endings of romance novels for a more nuanced, and ultimately more realistic view, of the messy, cluttered, and neurotic state of romantic relationships.
As author Sam Keen once observed, "You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly."
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