![]() ![]() Arguing is temporary, after all family is forever. The show that is, both as entertainment and as cultural commentary, exceptionally good. The show that centers, this time around, on the Alvarezes, a Cuban-American family, headed by a single mother (Justina Machado), living in Los Angeles. Yes, the remake of Norman Lear’s classic ’70s sitcom that premiered this month, with a full 13-episode season, on Netflix. I mention that-bear with me for a moment-because of One Day at a Time. We despair-because, while democracy demands debate, what the American version may not have anticipated is that debating is a skill as much as it is a pastime. Our discussions quickly veer into harassment. Recent years, though, have swapped that fear for another anxiety: that we have become bad not just at conversing, but, against all odds, at arguing. We are forgetting how to talk to each other, the warnings went we are forgetting how to listen to each other. Premieres: Tuesday, 9:30 p.m.Not too long ago, it was fashionable to fear that Americans are losing the fine art of conversation. I’m sure One Day at a Time will have a lot to say on the subject.Ĭast: Justina Machado, Rita Moreno, Todd Grinnell, Isabella Gomez, Marcel Ruiz, Stephen TobolowskyĬreators: Gloria Calderon Kellett, Mike Royce Still, the show’s leanings toward a kind of connection it’s never thought particularly urgent before - romantic love - may offer a new path forward. Each of the three episodes for review begins with Penelope in her veterans’ therapy group - an expository framing device that introduces the problem of the week more efficiently, but somewhat cuts into the show’s lived-in-ness. Vastly condensed is the Gloria Estefan-sung theme song (one of the few I never skip past), and the Season 3 cliff-hanger with Lydia finally returning to Cuba for the first time in two or three generations seems to have been completely dropped. And yet nothing beats the one-on-one scenes between Moreno and (also Emmy-deserving) Machado, who manage to evince between them decades-long layers of mother-daughter tension, as well as bottomless wellsprings of affection. ( ODAAT has never been more consistently hilarious.) Even the previous weak links, Todd Grinnell and Stephen Tobolowsky, who play the more broadly sketched Schneider and Leslie, respectively, are now wholly integrated into the cast. ![]() ![]() Offered sharper jokes than ever before, the ensemble, performing in front of a live studio audience, is wondrously friction-free. The fourth-season episodes also make clear that the core cast has become a perfectly calibrated comedy machine. No one in our family has ever done that!” And, of course, an informative, census-themed scene in the premiere, with guest star Ray Romano, proves that the show’s writers room is full of nerdy Elenas. Moreno reminds us that she’s been doing Emmy-worthy work all along with her hissy, scandalized delivery of Lydia’s extravagantly regressive take on self-pleasure: “It is a dirty, sinful habit for sad, ugly people…. The funniest of the upcoming installments, meanwhile, flips a sitcom trope by having Penelope’s teenage son, Alex (Marcel Ruiz), accidentally stumble upon her masturbating. Last season ended with Penelope graduating from her nurse practitioners’ program, and the strongest of the new episodes deal movingly with her lingering “scarcity mind-set” and her constant anxieties about money despite herhigher income bracket. Though none of the episodes features the emotional gravity that the show has worn on its sleeve, what is clear is that the writers are striving to provide as much continuity as possible. Pop TV only supplied critics with the first three episodes of the new season, so it’s difficult to evaluate at the present moment how creators Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce are tackling the preordained 21-minute run (with notable commercial breaks). ![]() And so as much as the series’ 11th-hour pickup by Pop TV made for one of the most memorable feel-good entertainment stories of last year, it’s been difficult not to wonder how a truncated run time might chop down such an essential component of the ODAAT formula. ODAAT has been, in other words, the rare series to take advantage of Netflix bloat (by expanding its tonal palette, and thus its topical and emotional range), rather than suffer from it. ![]()
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