Modern Love - Season 1

Despite its varying trials and travails, Modern Love strives for an overall feel-good vibe that isn't always entirely earned.

If you like crunchy, chewy centres, you might not find what you want in Modern Love, but if you're a fan of strawberry cremes, you're in luck. Though even the sweetest tooth might find the buoyant theme tune cloying by the third go-around.

Modern Love isn't bad, but it doesn't have many smart things to say about modernity or love. It's mostly trite and retrograde.

It's sweet, wonderfully musical, and populated by scores of attractive people. It's just a shame Modern Love feels so...sanitized.

Perhaps most egregiously of all, Modern Love, the television show, sands down the sharp, cutting, and often brutally introspective edges of Modern Love, the column.

At a time when conflict rages across the media, there's something appealing about pulling up the comforter and falling into "Modern Love."

The fantasy and sheen of romantic comedies is replaced with complicated emotions and difficult questions, and it's so welcome.

Modern Love is charming and visually striking.

A euphoric coda brings the entire series into perspective in a shimmering collage of a city teeming with love stories to be shared and savored.

Do you like Tina Fey, Anne Hathaway, Julia Garner or Catherine Keener? You can join any of them on a fairly involving journey exploring love and self without having to keep your backside glued to a cushion for more than 30 minutes.

Modern Love is here to tell us that now and then it's fine to sink into a scented bath of unabashed optimism, which is what this opening instalment delivers.

Watching "Modern Love" is about as much fun as listening to a New Yorker complain about not being able to find a good bagel or a decent slice. Like I said, it's a hate-watch.