Her breaking point comes when, at a board meeting for which the Hub is transformed into a lush Japanese garden, Byron announces that “Gogol is not a me anymore.

It isn’t exactly satisfying, but then, neither was her old life.

A decade into her stay in this sterile, creepily scentless place, everything from Hazel’s food intake to her sexual response has been quantified. Every aspect of life at the Hub has been calibrated to his specifications. One episode opens with a TV news segment on the Gogols, which Byron spontaneously starts directing when Hazel ventures off-script. He is, first and foremost, a control freak. She left behind not just her education, but also her friends and family to live with him at the Hub-an isolated sort of shape-shifting luxury home and tech campus that can be programmed to resemble any place in the world.īyron comes off as an amalgam of several different tech titans he has Musk’s awkward bravado, Bezos’ supercharged physique, Mark Zuckerberg’s disregard for others’ privacy, Peter Thiel’s eerie transhumanism.

Played by Cristin Milioti in a lovably self-destructive performance that recalls her messy, time-looping maid of honor role in Palm Springs, Hazel was still a college student running minor scams to pay bills when the billionaire inventor Byron Gogol ( Game Night‘s Billy Magnussen) proposed to her midway through a surreal first date that should have raised some red flags. Hazel Gogol, née Green, the protagonist of HBO Max’s odd, enjoyable but somewhat slight Made for Love, is one of these women.

Made for love alissa nutting summary