Summary
So up on your feet, because one of the most joyous sitcoms returns for a second year – and it’s not holding back on the politics either.
The multi-camera sitcom may have made an unexpected comeback with Fuller House in 2016, but it was the Netflix’s revival of ONE DAY AT A TIME that took us completely by surprise. Reworking Norman Lear’s beloved 1970s show, transplanting the concept to a Cuban-American family struggling with contemporary America was surprisingly fresh and disarmingly funny.
The first season had a loose arc of newly single Penelope Alvarez (Justina Machado), a veteran of the Army Nursing Corps, trying to raise her two children Elena (Isabella Gómez) and Alex (Marcel Ruiz) with the help of her outlandish Cuban mother Lydia (Rita Moreno). It concluded with Elena coming to terms with her own sexuality, and one of the better ‘coming out’ arcs of recent television memory.
The follow-up season finds itself firmly inside Trump’s America, even if his name isn’t mentioned once throughout the show. Early in the season, Alex is acting out as the result of racial taunts at school. It’s the start of an arc that sees the Canadian Schneider (Todd Grinnell) and Lydia pursue citizenship, with Penelope concerned that they are both potential targets “now we have that monster in the White House.”
ONE DAY AT A TIME doesn’t stop there, with the season’s fifth episode (‘Locked Down’) tackling the gun control debate with a balance that never feels like a centrist concession. There’s also a powerful mental health arc that runs through Penelope’s attempts to balance her career, family, and growing romantic life. Which is where the strength of the show has always been in all of its formats: a genuinely likeable group of people just dealing with stuff in the modern world.
Machado gets some quality writing this season, showcasing her admirable mixture of tough-as-nails and exhaustedly vulnerable. Grinnell continues to channel the affable charm of the original Schneider, offering wisdom between the regular gaffes and misadventures. In one episode, Gómez dresses in a near-identical outfit to Pat Harrington Jr. when she starts helping out as the building’s super.
There’s also a fun cameo from the original show’s Mackenzie Phillips too. Yet it’s the incomparable Moreno who continues to prove that she’s an international treasure. The showrunners have crafted her as an older woman with a sexual appetite, another of the many ways in which the show distinguishes itself from its contemporaries. Whether it’s rebuffing Dr. Berkowitz (Stephen Tobolowsky), or gloriously telling us “I want to live in America.”
It’s become almost trite to say this, but ONE DAY AT A TIME is the sitcom the world needs right now. If it was simply about political commentary, it would disappear amongst the myriad of late night talk shows who have bountiful fodder to play with. Instead, it exposes the plights of real people who have to get through the complex maze one day at a time – and has a lot of silly fun doing it. Now try and get that Gloria Estefan cover of the theme song out of your head.
