True Love? On TV, There’s an App for That

Dystopian streaming shows like “Made for Love” and “The One” imagine what happens when Big Tech creeps into finding soul mates and fixing marriages.

Delete Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, Raya. Tell OkCupid to put its digital arrows away. To find true love, pluck a hair, seal it in a baggie, place the baggie inside a dedicated mailer and wait for your phone to chime with an update on your perfect match. This is the biotech fantasy of “The One,” a Netflix thriller. On “Soulmates,” last year’s anthology series on AMC, your data is uploaded via a painless retinal scan, but the life partner payoff remains the same. Both near-future shows imagine a world in which tech companies have perfected a dating disrupter. Think Tinder meets 23andMe. These series assume that most people would prefer to buy their way out of the confusion and guesswork of courtship, which is probably true, and that biometrics alone can predict your match, which is probably not. These shows are largely dystopian. As is “Made for Love,” a mordant comedy on HBO Max that imagines a microchip that would provide access to all of your partner’s sensory data, a surveillance tool dressed up as a dream of perfect union. Each endorses an idea that goes all the way back to Plato’s “Symposium” — that there is a person out there for each of us and that to meet that other half is to experience instant, permanent attachment. Here’s how Plato puts it: “The pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and would not be out of the other’s sight.”