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One Day at a Time: “The Politics Episode”

Every time I'm ready to give up on this series, it surprises me. But not always in a good way.

For example, the most recent episode was the first effort by a major TV series to find a way around the rules of social distancing by using animation to alleviate the need for having cast members stand so close to each other. And while the animation was nothing to make a fuss about, it worked well enough that I looked forward to seeing future episodes filmed in a similar fashion.

Unfortunately, the script was another matter. Granted, one could expect only so much from a thirty-minute sitcom episode but I still found it hard to put up with the constant parade of political cheap shots masquerading as jokes.

Yes, I get it. Nowadays is a very frustrating time to be a liberal. On the other hand, it is also frustrating to be a conservative -- especially one who does not automatically agree with the current occupant of the Oval Office. Moreover, there used to be a time when Norman Lear shows found time to focus on nuances that most sitcoms avoided. However, if the current version of One Day at a Time is any indication, those days are long gone.

Anyway, I could have lived with a sitcom whose political beliefs were different from mine if the jokes were actually funny. But like the conservative show Last Man Standing, the writers often assumed that their political humor was a lot more clever than it actually was.

It was not until toward the end of the show when the show showed a hypothetical dialogue between lead character Penelope and her conservative cousin Estrellita that the show showed any sign of genuine wit. Ironically, the one thing that won me over was the way the show managed to evoke the specter of Fidel Castro in order to explain the political viewpoints of Estrellita and Penelope without turning it into a cliché. A lesser show would have either ignored Castro or else exploited him for a number of political cheap shots. But the show managed to find a way around all that that evoked genuine sympathy from me for both Penelope and her cousin -- and for that, I am grateful.

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One Day at a Time: “Supermoon”

A lot of the episodes that I've seen of this series have been surprisingly meh, making me wonder what exactly TV critics saw in this show in order to make it a "critically acclaimed" series. I don't expect every TV show about Hispanics to feature characters who act like the Hispanics I know in real life -- especially since few of those Hispanics are Cuban-Americans like the ones in this show. On the other hand, I would like to see some type of recognizable emotion in the characters who do appear on the show as well as the commitment on the part of the writers to at least try to keep things interesting. But up until this episode, I've been disappointed in all that.

Then, toward the end of the episode, Lydia -- the mother of the lead character -- talked about visiting her home in Cuba and not feeling at home and then suddenly for the first time since I started watching this show, I saw something I could identify with. After all, when I last visited my hometown of Detroit back in the 1980s, I had a similar feeling. A feeling that, yes, Detroit will always be my home -- but not in the same way that Dallas was. Dallas was where I grew up. Where I first fell in love. Where I first met my best friend. For the longest time, I did not want to admit this. After all, I loved Detroit and I missed my kinfolk there. For many years, I felt closer to them than to anyone in Texas outside of my own family. And yet the last time I visited there, I found myself missing Dallas. And like Lydia, I was forced to face the fact that my former home was no longer my home.

I still don't yet know whether to regard this episode as a lucky fluke. After all, the writing is still very mediocre and while I have a strong affection for Rita Moreno and Justina Machado, I can't help but feel that both actresses have done better work on other TV shows. And yet part of me is starting to become optimistic about this show's future -- as odd as that seems in the Age of Social Distancing.

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One Day at a Time: “Pitching Pennies”

Geez. It used to be the one thing one could expect from a Norman Lear show was a bit of sympathy for working class folk, if not a bit of understanding for the way they are. But apparently all that went out with the twentieth century.

Thus we get a lot of fuss made over the fact that a hard-working nurse like Penelope (the lead character, played by Justina Machado) refused to spend money unnecessarily -- hardly an unheard thing among the Hispanics I knew growing up. But we see little -- if any -- effort put into explaining what made her that way. Indeed, the very idea that Penelope needed to be "fixed" because she did not believe in spending extra money seemed offensive.

I suppose I should take heart and see my reaction to this episode as yet more proof that I'm not as Americanized as I think I am. And yet I suspect this reaction more accurately means that I have more in common -- philosophically, at least -- with the average white American-born senior citizen than I do with the "woke" individuals who worked on this episode.

Oh, well. As much as I like the idea of a Hispanic sitcom based on what was once one of my favorite TV shows, it seemed fairly obvious that this show was not made with people like me in mind.

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One Day at a Time: “Checking Boxes”

I finally got a chance to catch up with this show and my first thought was: Is that all there is to it?

And my second thought: This is supposed to be a critically acclaimed TV series? Dios knows that I tend to have a soft spot for comedy but for some reason -- okay, a lot of reasons -- this series didn't work for me.

As much as I admire supporting actress Rita Moreno and her past work and as much as I respect Justina Machado's work on Six Feet Under, I could not help feeling a little disappointed in their latest show. I would like to hope that it gets better as time goes on but since this is the first show of the fourth season, I'm not optimistic. And while I don't kid myself that the original One Day at a Time was a flawless classic, it did have a sense of story and character that used to be quite common in popular TV sitcoms. The newer version seems more content to rely on PC stereotypes and PC-related jokes that just don't work.

Oh, well. It lasted three seasons prior to this one so apparently somebody likes it...

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Shameless (U.S.): “Los Diablos!”

Every time I'm tempted to write this show off as just one long exercise in bad taste, it manages to come up with surprising sharp -- if not always subtle -- social commentary. For example. it seems to be the one show on TV right now which seems to show a little sympathy for the people who have seen their jobs disappear due to changing technology and in this episode, it actually bothered to tackle the very controversial subject of interracial prejudice -- specifically black-on-Hispanic prejudice -- without the usual PC rationalizations. So, good job.

Granted, it might have been nice if the writers had come up with a better solution than having the nice brown-skinned people just go away but I suppose it could have been worse. At least, they tried to depict the problem in a relatively honest fashion without the usual pretenses about how such a problem would never occur in an all-white neighborhood.

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Weeds: “No Man Is Pudding”

I've been wanting to avoid talking about certain episodes of the fourth season of Weeds because that was when the show started to become maddeningly uneven. Not because of the Mexican characters. In fact, when I look back at that season, I get more irritated by the white non-Hispanic characters like the one played by Albert Brooks. But I get a sense from certain online comments by fans of Weeds that the whole show started going downhill in the fourth season because the main character Nancy Botwin got involved with Mexicans and that was the fault of the Mexican characters that the show kept going downhill. I don't agree with that argument. However, I suspect that a lot of people out there do.

In any event, "No Man Is Pudding" is one of my favorite episodes of Weeds if for no other reason that it has such a surreally WTF-type ending. I have tried several times to try to think of a written description that could do it justice but perhaps the best way to describe it is to show you this.



And yes, that was Demián Bichir of A Better Life fame standing there at the end with a big cigar in his hand. For that matter, Mary-Louise Parker -- aka Nancy Botwin -- also put on a pretty good performance even though most of it in that sequence was just a reaction.

Anyway, with all this talk about building a wall on the Mexican-U.S, border, I could not help thinking of this sequence as the ultimate argument against such a project. There are obviously more idealistic reasons but I don't see President Trump paying much attention to those. "They're just going to go under it" is no doubt far from the best argument I can come up with but at least there is a small -- very small -- chance that he might listen to it. But who knows?

Then again there have already been real-life examples of that tunnel -- and yet Trump is still trying to go ahead with his Wall project. Heck, there was even one on the Canadian-U.S. border. I'm kinda surprised that we haven't heard more about that one.

And now I'm imagining a bunch of Canadians in Ontario digging a tunnel under the Detroit River and finally saying upon its completion. "Okay, hosers! We're open for business."

Hmmm.

Perhaps I'm better off thinking about that tunnel in terms of yonic symbolism. Nancy Botwin stares into a tunnel and sees -- what, exactly? Life? Death? A path to heaven? Her own -- ahem -- yoni? The mind boggles at the possibilities. I might have to write another essay about this episode very soon. We'll see.

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The Wild Wild West: "The Night of the Steel Assassin"

The villain's last name in this episode would be Torres, wouldn't it? And yet when I first saw this episode as a teenager, I thought nothing of that fact. I was more impressed by the fact that he seemed to be somebody's idea of a nineteenth century version of the bionic man -- only he was created long before anyone had heard of bionic men. Then again, The Wild Wild West was dealing with steampunk-style stories long before anyone ever heard of steampunk so I should not have been surprised.

In any event, when I was a kid, I was fascinated by stories featuring characters that were far more stronger and tougher than myself. I suspect most kids are -- hence the popularity of such benign heroes as Superman, the Six Million Dollar Man and the various animated incarnations of Popeye and Hercules. Of course, I suspect the popularity of vampire movies like the 1972 made-for-TV movie The Night Stalker are also based on such fascination. And of course, it is no accident that popular action movies like the James Bond films regularly feature the hero triumphing over villains who are bigger and stronger than him.

Anyway, Torres was out to seek revenge against President U.S. Grant and agent James West had to stop him. Did he succeed? Well, the name of the show was obviously not The Wild Wild Torres so what do you think?

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The Wild Wild West: “The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth”

This was the first episode with everyone's favorite half-“Hispanic” villain Dr. Miguelito Loveless (played by the unimitable Michael Dunn). Of course, as played by Mr. Dunn, Dr. Loveless came across as being about as Hispanic as James Joyce but he still made for a compelling villain. And it didn't hurt that he had Richard Kiel playing his tall, childlike henchman Voltaire. (It said something about the subtlety of the show's humor that a big bad henchman like Voltaire had the same name as a famous French intellectual despite being anything but intellectual.) Rounding out the trio was Dr. Loveless's sister Antoinette, a normal-sized woman played by Phoebe Dorin who constantly demonstrated Loveless's human side by singing with him almost every other time we saw her.

Dr. Loveless would prove to be a recurring character on The Wild, Wild West, basically playing yin to James West's yang in a number of episodes. Granted, the character itself -- a short man trying to act big -- had cliché written all over it, but it's a tribute to Mr. Dunn that the role nevertheless came across in a memorable fashion. James West faced other villains in other episodes, of course, but Dr. Loveless, I suspect, was always his most popular foe. He obviously seemed quite popular with the writers.

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Cristela: "Mexican Mona Lisa"

I wish I had liked this show a lot more than I did. I really wanted to like it because of Cristela Alonzo's character but it just didn't seem as imaginative as I'd hoped. As cartoonish as Ugly Betty was, it at least aspired to portray something close to modern-day reality by acknowledging the fact that most of us work in a predominantly white yet still multiracial environment. Cristela, on the other hand, still prefers a world of--ahem--black and white, if not brown and white. I don't want to blame this all on Alonzo; after all, I have no idea how much control she had over her material nor how much of the show was influenced by non-Hispanic studio executives. But I still felt the show could have been more promising than it was.

I wanted to root for Alonzo's character but I kept wishing the writing was better, the characterization sharper, the family conflicts not so banal. I would love to see her get a second chance but knowing Hollywood, I doubt that's very likely. But maybe some executive will prove me wrong. I certainly hope so.

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Devious Maids: "Pilot"

I wish I hated this show a lot more than I did. But once I got past the dubious concept behind it, I actually found myself liking it.
Granted, I liked it better when it was making fun of rich white people but still. I was surprised because I really wanted to hate it.

On the plus side, it was nice to see Judy Reyes of Scrubs working -- though I wish she had a better role than maid if for no other reason than the fact that you already see too many Hispanic women on TV playing maids. And my late sister the All My Children fan would have appreciated the fact that it also had a starring role for Susan Lucci even though her character was more benign than the one she played on All My Children.

On the down side, it doesn't even pretend to aspire to any type of social realism. And yes, I know some people would consider that a plus because producer Marc Cherry isn't exactly known for such work but still.