Cristin Milioti is having a bit of a moment. Between her killer turn as Sofia Falcone in The Penguin and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Miniseries, the How I Met Your Mother star has finally become a household name. But while fans are catching up with her HBO hits like The Resort, Fargo, and Black Mirror, there’s one series that’s become a ghost in the machine. Literally. Made for Love, Milioti’s deeply unsettling sci-fi satire, no longer exists on HBO Max. It was deleted. Completely erased. Forever. And Cristin is pissed.
“It’s so f**ked up,” she told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast. “That happened because, umm, we were a tax write-off. I did it for Max… I just know that they ripped it off the platform… like when they ripped Westworld off. And it’s such a bummer because, you know, that was three years of our lives.”
Three years of her life have been deleted. And not just for hers, but for the entire cast and crew, including Ray Romano, who played her estranged dad in one of Made for Love‘s most emotionally grounded subplots. “We had to do a lot of like… you know… intimate and sad stuff,” she recalled. “Like a father and daughter that can’t make it work.”
Based on a 2017 novel by Alissa Nutting, Paramount Television Studios’ Made for Love premiered April 1, 2021, on HBO Max. Over two seasons, the show followed Hazel Green, a woman running away from a broken marriage to an Elon Musk-type tech billionaire named Byron Gogol, who secretly implanted a chip in her brain to track her sight, emotions, and whereabouts.
It was dark, satirical, occasionally hilarious, and more timely than anyone realized. “There are so many parts of that show that have become like eerily prescient,” Milioti said. “It was all about people in this world of like advanced technology and utterly unable to communicate with each other.”
Made for Love was quietly canceled in June 2022 after two seasons—another casualty of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Then, in December 2022, it was pulled from HBO Max entirely. And unlike some vanished shows, Made for Love isn’t even available to buy. “You can’t even buy it,” Milioti stressed. “It’s so weird… I’m also like… it’s like on a USB stick somewhere probably. Just put it up.”
She’s tried asking around and has spoken to friends at Warner Bros., people at Paramount (who produced the show), but no one knows where it is. Or who owns what. “It just feels like… no one really knows,” she said. “Which is also really nuts.”
When Maron asked if she’d talked to a lawyer, she laughed, “I don’t have a lawyer. Just an agent.”
While Milioti hopes Netflix will rescue it, or that someone at HBO Max suddenly grows a conscience and puts it back up, Made for Love will continue to live in digital purgatory forever. Still, Cristin Milioti wants people to remember that the show existed and that it deserved better. Her request: “Just like… slap it up there and see what happens.”
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