For a while now, trailers have been playing around with unconventional covers of pop songs as a way of setting up a specific mood, but Made for Love may have all other contenders beat thanks to Ray Romano: The wild new dark comedy series, which will premiere on HBO Max this April after making its official premiere at this year's SXSW Film Festival, features the veteran star's nuanced cover of an all-time-great Beyonce track.
Speaking of great, Cristin Milioti stars in Made for Love, a series that admittedly has a bit of a Black Mirror feel to it, if only based on the official synopsis:
The comedy series is a darkly absurd and cynically poignant story of love and divorce. It follows Hazel Green (Cristin Milioti), a thirty-something woman on the run after 10 years in a suffocating marriage to Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), a controlling tech billionaire. Soon she discovers that her husband has implanted a monitoring device – the Made for Love chip – in her brain, allowing him to track her, watch her, and know her "emotional data" as she tries to regain her independence. Through the chip, Byron's able to watch Hazel's every move as she flees to her desert hometown to take refuge with her aging widower father Herbert (Ray Romano) and his synthetic partner, Diane.
While Black Mirror might be a comparison point, this isn't an anthology series and thus an entirely different type of storytelling is possible. In addition to Milioti, Magnussen, and Romano, the cast includes Dan Bakkedahl, Noma Dumezweni, and Augusto Aguilera, with guest stars including Caleb Foote, Kym Whitley, Nyasha Hatendi, Patti Harrison, Ione Skye, Jon Daly, Matty Cardarople, Mel Rodriguez, and Sarunas Jackson.
Christina Lee (Search Party, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp) is the showrunner, and here's another reason to get excited: One of the series' directors is S.J. Clarkson, whose credits include Succession, Collateral, and the pilot of Marvel's Jessica Jones.
Made for Love will debut on HBO Max this April. Check out the trailer, featuring Romano's dulcet tones, below.