I'm giving this show three stars because it has a great premise, a decent cast, and good production values. The problem is that the writing is so bad that all of that potential is completely squandered. After getting off to a solid start in the first couple episodes, this series quickly pulls a Vasa and founders before really even sailing out of the harbor. This is the kind of show where the writers feel the need to have the main character explicitly describe the obvious thematic parallels between her dysfunctional marriage and her father's relationship to his Real Doll because, I guess, they don't think their audience can figure it out on their own. It seems to desperately want to be a biting satire, but it has no teeth, no wit, no understanding of technology or even, it seems, of human beings. There's a certain extent to which it also seems to want to be about the characters, but despite the best efforts of some of the performers, these people barely exist in the two dimensional plane. Seemingly significant characters hang around for a couple episodes then vanish with no consequence to the overall story, or they show up late in the season and do virtually nothing. By contrast, an inordinate amount of time is spent on scenes between the psychopathic husband and his assistant without any character development for either. It seems pointless. If the writers just want them to be the archetypes of the villain and toady, they should just go for that and spare their audience the tedium of their endless unnecessary scenes together. To a certain extent, those three stars I'm giving this are actually more damning than zero stars because, honestly, there is so much potential here that it seems like it would be nearly impossible to screw it up, yet somehow these writers succeeded.
Review of Made for Love
