the beginning of “Made for Love,” when Hazel is staring at Diane the sex doll’s pine coffin and thinking that she could sleep in it, we seem to have caught her at a similar point as “Tampa” did Celeste—on a precipice, that is, about to tumble into total self-destruction, doomed by a certain Florida frame of mind. Hazel has just run away from her husband, a billionaire tech C.E.O. named Byron Gogol, who has been trying to implant a microchip in her brain. “Like a file-share thing,” Hazel explains to her father, as he sits on his motorized scooter and cuddles with Diane. “We would meld. The first neural-networked couple in history.” (“Made for Love” is set in 2019, to accommodate advances like sleep-optimization helmets and the “tincture of spaghetti odor” that Byron sniffs while slurping his meal-replacement shakes.)

Made for Love is a darkly funny and absurd comedy from Alissa Nutting, Dean Bakopoulos, and Patrick Somerville, set in the not-so-distant future. Billy Magnussen’s Byron Gogol is a not-so-subtle tech billionaire who reminds us of the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world. Wealthy beyond compare and living in his own crazy compound, he lives a manicured and seemingly perfect life. He’s got his own literal world, employees who keep him updated on the business, a loving wife, and even a dolphin named Zelda to swim with in his pool.Perhaps years ago Byron was a more loving husband and a bit more empathetic, but his devotion has taken a sour turn. Did Hazel enjoy her 3248th ******? He would like a five-star rating. Why would she want to leave their perfect little cube? She’s got sunny days and perfect weather. Is she tired? It’s time for her scheduled nap.

He’s so committed to love, he’s ready to submit himself and Hazel as Users One for the Made for Love chip. “Comingled hearts, comingled minds, comingled identities. Secrets dismantled. Pure. Union,” says the serene ad for the chip. Except, there’s a small issue on the synchronization of the chip and only Hazel gets the chip. I guess Byron probably doesn’t want his wife inside of his head all the time, imagine that.

Milioti and Magnussen are in their perfect roles here. Milioti leans into her bright smile and perfect-wife persona while her true thoughts hide bitterness and resentment after being kept as a prisoner in her marriage for the past decade. Magnussen embodies what you’d imagine a tech-savvy, genius billionaire might be. Striking blue eyes, bronze blonde hair, and perfect suits all topped off with a shark-like smile. Both of their perfect veneers quickly fade as the story kicks off.

Having just seen the pilot episode for SXSW, I can tell this series is about to be a wild ride. With eight episodes waiting in the wings, Made for Love is set to premiere three episodes on April 1st, 2021. Three more episodes will air the following week on April 8th, and then the final two on April 15th.

But it’s quickly obvious that Byron is not the most trustworthy or empathetic of people and his wife is not as happy as she might make herself seem. In a similar vein to Prime Video’s Upload, Made for Love examines a culture of people attached to technology and obsessed with it. Hazel’s life, even cloistered in Byron’s compound alone, is made to seem idyllic because of technology. Her home is pristine, everything is smooth and glossy and clean. But beneath the surface, there is something rotten in the state of Gogol.

Nutting’s first novel, “Tampa,” featured a very different protagonist: a sociopathic, twenty-six-year-old middle-school teacher named Celeste, who admits, in the book’s second paragraph, that she’s a dedicated pedophile who lusts after fourteen-year-old boys. She carefully grooms her target, a student named Jack, and then engages him in a queasy, compulsive affair. Nutting’s deviant flair for comedy generally involves doubling down on a wildly uncomfortable situation or image, and in “Tampa,” this tactic often overwhelms whatever hard, awful humor is there to be found. Celeste covers her breasts in whipped cream in the opening scene of the novel, hoping that her flesh will absorb the scent of dairy, and fantasizes about chaperoning a junior-high dance and whispering, to some poor soul, “I want to smell you come in your pants.” Celeste ruins Jack’s life swiftly, and she ends up in a beach town, hunting boys who are bored on family trips and planning for the day when she’ll have to move to a city “with runaways hungry for cash.”

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Byron is probably going to murder her, Hazel muses, with the ruefulness of a person who has just found out that a restaurant is out of guacamole. He has invested a lot of money in her, and running away will deeply inconvenience him. The unlikely pair met after Byron gave a commencement speech at the college that Hazel had formerly been enrolled in: her friend Jenny, a student reporter with the flu, asks Hazel to interview Byron in her place. Byron quickly suggests a six-month relationship contract, and Hazel goes off to live in his residence, “The Hub,” which feels like “where the deceased go to cool down to the afterlife’s new room temperature.” The setup, at the beginning, is not unlike that of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” and Byron eventually frames the mind meld as a romantic gesture; before he asks Hazel if he could microchip her, he drops to one knee.

Hazel’s father, meanwhile, truly loves Diane the sex doll, whose drawn-on smile can be replaced by a handy opening that resembles a “baboon’s ***.” He treats Diane tenderly and respectfully, buries his head in her hair. She offers advantages over human women. “Every date I went on . . . I’m thinking, ‘This lady is too nice for me to die on top of,’ ” he says. “But Diane here . . . I can die on Diane all I want.” Another character, a con man named Jasper who literally screws women out of their fortunes, by engaging them in thrilling romantic relationships and then asking to borrow large sums of money, wishes that sex with his targets would “feel more like work, like what he did was closer to prostitution than to fraud. But the sex with them was effortless; he never had to fake arousal. He liked to consider himself a feminist in this way.” After all, feminists are “all about body acceptance, and he had always accepted every body.”

Nutting gets enormous mileage out of the labyrinthine ways in which her characters redirect their romantic impulses. And she has a knack for placing moments of tender horror where straightforward affection might otherwise live. Hazel recalls meeting Byron: “His haircut creeped her out the way freshly hedged lawns sometimes did, making her feel like life was already over and she’d arrived on the planet too late.” When Byron holds her after sex, it is “more an immobilization than an embrace, like a parent putting his arms around a child before a vaccination shot to ensure stillness.” At her first taste of freedom, going for a solo drink at a filthy bar called the Spotted Rose, Hazel experiences an intense wave of gratitude, which she mistakes for “a diarrheal precursor.” At the bar, she meets a man named Liver who works as a part-time gravesitter; when they eventually have sex, Hazel likens her experience to that of a mechanic rolling around under a truck. When they snuggle afterward, it feels like “two hard-boiled eggs rubbing up against each other as they pickled together in a jar.”

Somehow, Nutting is able to use this register of exhilarated lovelessness to extract affection from the reader in great quantities. “Made for Love,” more than any other novel I’ve read lately, exudes valiant charm. You root for Hazel the way you do for Laura Dern’s sealant-huffing character in Alexander Payne’s 1996 comedy “Citizen Ruth,” or for a scrappy stray dog. And as is true for many stray dogs, things do get quite dark for Hazel. In one incredible scene, she drunkenly crawls on her hands and knees through the trailer park where her father lives, sprays a hose directly at her face for hydration purposes, then tackles a plastic flamingo, which she hoists over her shoulders like a crucifix and tucks fondly into bed. Another day, she gets her arm stuck in Diane’s usable mouth, and screams for mercy “as though the doll were a hairless, giant-breasted attack dog.” Close to the end of the book, a woman named Ms. Cheese tells Hazel, “I hope you win your soul back in a bet or something.” There is no redemptive thesis in “Made for Love” whatsoever: when Hazel begins to gradually emerge from her chrysalis of pathos and male entrapment, she’s much the worse for what she’s gone through. Even so, the book is a total joyride, dizzying and surprising, like a state-fair roller coaster that makes you queasy for a moment but leaves you euphoric in the end.