Cristin Milioti and co. are returning to the Hub! HBO Max recently announce that they’ve renewed tech satire Made for Love for a second season. Based on Alissa Nutting’s 2017 novel, the critically acclaimed first season followed Hazel (Milioti) as she tried to escape her suffocating marriage to tech billionaire Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen) even as he monitored her every movement with a tracking device implanted in her brain. Along the way, she reconnected with her estranged father Herbert (Ray Romano), who happened to be in a bizarre relationship of his own, with a silicon sex doll named Diane.
“We’re thrilled we get the chance to work with our incredible cast and crew again,” executive producers and season two showrunners Christina Lee and Nutting said in a statement. “We would’ve announced the pick-up earlier, but it was a beast closing Diane’s deal. Everyone thinks she’s a doll but she’s a real hard-ass.”
The show’s eight-episode first season ended with a devastating twist: after learning of her dad’s terminal illness, she returns to Byron’s sealed compound where he promises to help treat Herb. That was a major departure from the novel, in which Hazel opts to care for Herb herself rather than returning to the Hub—one that clearly sets up more story to come.
“We wanted this choice for her to ultimately choose her father over her own freedom,” Lee told Decider back in April. “We felt like that would lead to more questions and more story.”
For her part, Milioti has pointed to the ambiguity at the end of Season 1 as an indication of where the series might go next. In the final shot, it’s Hazel who takes Byron’s hand, hinting that she’s made a choice and won’t remain passive going forward. “It’s not like she’s being led back in like a dog on a leash or something,” she said in a recent Q&A. “She is also complicit in this return, and it was a bit out of her hands, and it’s just like there’s so many colors there, and I get really, for lack of a better term, jazzed by ambiguous moments like that.”
And of course, there are lingering questions about Byron. In the Season 1 finale, Magnussen’s character revealed his real name, hinting at a working-class background and complicated family history. “People were asking: Why doesn’t he know who Willy Wonka is? Like, who is this guy? Is the Greg Benson thing real?” Lee told Deadline in April. “And I will say that is something that we want to address in Season 2, among everything else.”
Everything else? Like, how Gogol henchpersons Fiffany (Noma Dumezweni) and Herringbone (Dan Bakkedahl) will escape “the pasture”? And how Herb and Diane are going to adjust to life in the Hub? And any number of other tech developments the series can lampoon. As Nutting has said the possibilities are endless: “I think the nice thing about this show is that technology isn’t going away anytime soon and neither are our relationships, so we kind of have this evergreen content.”
