I’ve watched the first five of 10 episodes, and the question the new season seems to be weighing is, if a program can provide the kinds of relationships some humans most crave-the “girlfriend experience” writ even simpler and more purely transactional-then what will happen to desire? At work, she begins an ambitious project to create an AI that can read and display emotions as efficiently and compellingly as a person can. Iris supplements her new career with an evening job providing the “girlfriend experience” to wealthy men, but her motivations, the show suggests, are complex-she doesn’t crave money or control, like Keough’s character, but rather seeks a fuller understanding of human nature.
The third season, though, gets a dystopian twist with the addition of emerging technology: Iris (Julia Goldani Telles) is an American student who abandons her postgraduate studies in neuroscience to work for a London start-up that’s analyzing the science of desire. The world of The Girlfriend Experience is robotic and sometimes surreal the primary characters begin each season thinking that they can manipulate sex work to their advantage-whether they’re proved right or wrong is up to the audience to decide. In the second, Anna Friel and Carmen Ejogo appeared in dual narratives about women trying to conquer systems that seem implacably rigged against them. In the first season of the show, Riley Keough played a law student compelled by the power she found in trading sex for money.
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The Starz series spins off of Soderbergh’s 2009 film, a cold shrug of a story featuring the former adult-film star Sasha Grey as a high-end sex worker in New York at the beginning of the financial crisis. Is there power, though, in being an object? Over three seasons, The Girlfriend Experience, produced by Steven Soderbergh, has wondered just that. Made for Love overbearingly emphasizes, as if viewers can’t be trusted to intuit it for themselves, that Diane and Hazel are essentially the same-that their partners would rather have an inanimate object as their significant other than the emotional and intellectual challenge of a living, breathing woman. When Hazel finally arrives at her father’s house after her escape, she finds him in flagrante with a sex doll named Diane. One character (played by Noma Dumezweni) is named Fiffany. There’s a friendly dolphin and a strip club called The Scanty Panty and the jokey maiming of an antagonist. If this setup sounds bleak, it’s neutered by Made for Love’s breezily wacky tone.
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Read: Why TV is so anxious about free will But, as if to prove Schopenhauer’s argument that possession is the ultimate ambition of a man in love, he concludes he needs authority over Hazel’s mind, too, and that’s what compels her to break away. For a decade, Byron has controlled Hazel’s external existence: her daily schedule, her outfits, even the timing of her orgasms. Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), Hazel’s former partner, is a kind of Elon Musk by way of Stretch Armstrong, all comically brawny arms and megalomaniacal instincts. On Made for Love, adapted from Alissa Nutting’s semi-absurdist 2017 novel, Hazel (played by Cristin Milioti) escapes in the first episode from The Hub, a virtual-reality retreat where she’s been living with her reclusive, tech-giant husband. But they also use futuristic technology to complicate the subject of desire-to imagine what we might want if anything were possible, and how much control we’d crave over others. The two series are curious about what we really want from the people we love. The clothes are made of latex and the gourmet dinners are sashimi, both smooth and chilly to the touch. On Starz’s third season of The Girlfriend Experience, which will debut in May and places its central character within a groundbreaking start-up in what seems to be the near future, all the messiest and most primal human experiences-eating, fucking, fighting-are rendered sterile, and bloodless. On Made for Love, HBO Max’s zany new series about a woman who manages to escape what’s essentially a virtual-reality prison, the contrast between her pristine digital surroundings and her disheveled, pine-paneled childhood home makes for the show’s most effective comedy. Everything is shiny and unsullied by human fingerprints. Everything is gleaming white, a triumph of polymers and marble and Windex. On television these days, the near future tends to look like an Apple Store.
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