"If Jonathan and Mira’s relationship seems better than Johan and Marianne’s, it must also be acknowledged that Levi sets his couple an easier problem. Bergman s

"If Jonathan and Mira’s relationship seems better than Johan and Marianne’s, it must also be acknowledged that Levi sets his couple an easier problem. Bergman suggested that marriage was meant to address a metaphysical need: our connection to reality. Levi, by contrast, sees marriage as a way of navigating one’s place in the economic and social order.[..]. The shift is telling. If marriage is composed of a set of tasks or projects—a career, parenting, keeping a home—its failures can be displayed as extrinsic to the question of how spouses connect. Levi’s diagnosis is something like: these people have different priorities. This means that their lives can succeed to a greater extent than their marriage does. What was, in Bergman’s hands, a horrifying picture of the limits of human contact becomes, in Levi’s, a set of increasingly independent journeys of personal growth." This is I think a fantastic observation about a lot of fiction that deals with personal relationships today. What bugs me about so many of them is how narcissistic they are in the sense that the question all of them seem to pose is how relationships can be managed like a project, almost like a self-help career guide. As the article points out Bergman's original piece asked fundamental questions about the nature (and limits) of human connections. From the first two episodes of the new version I've seen it has exactly the kind of atmosphere the article describes, how marriage is 'managed' and organized in relationship to work, careers and so forth.