Season two of anthology drama Modern Love premieres on Amazon Prime Aug. 13. Inspired by the New York Times column of the same name, there are eight episodes. Among them, Minnie Driver and Tom Burke star in “On a Serpentine Road, With the Top Down,” about a woman torn up about what to do with her late husband’s vintage car, and “Strangers on a Train,” which sees Lucy Boynton and Kit Harington play characters who meet on a train in Ireland, and promise to meet on the train two weeks later, without exchanging numbers. Then the pandemic hits.
Anna Paquin, Garrett Hedlund and Tobias Menzies are also in the season two cast. John Carney, executive producer, called it “an interesting cross-section of actors and movie stars.”
Carney got involved with Modern Love when he was shooting a film in New York, got into reading the newspaper column and, as luck would have it, got a call from a producer about working on Modern Love.
He likes that pretty much everything in the series happened in real life. “Nothing nowadays has much relationship with fact,” Carney said. “It’s lovely to be involved in a show in which you’ve got some baseline facts in it.”
Carney added, “Sometimes the make-y up-y nature of a TV show — enough already.”
An Irishman, Carney directed the film Once, about a lovesick street musician in Dublin.
All the episodes come from “Modern Love” columns, but Carney, who wrote the episodes, said “Strangers on a Train” came from “Modern Love” offshoot “Tiny Love Stories,” which happen in just one paragraph.
Season two of Modern Love was shot in Albany, Schenectady and Troy, New York, and overseas in London and Dublin. COVID prevented the producers from shooting in New York City, so they headed upstate. “We couldn’t get a big enough soundstage to keep the air flowing and do all the COVID protocol,” said Carney.
COVID caused some headaches, but Carney is not complaining. “I wasn’t driving a bus in Manhattan in March or April of 2020,” he said, “or having [to do] a real job.”
