What It’s Like Watching ‘Lady Dynamite’ After You’ve Lived In A Psych Ward

Maria Bamford opens the first episode of Lady Dynamite with a bright, hallucinatory commercial for a line of hair care products. “It’s my life,” she announces with the self-assured femininity of a 1980’s tampon ad, “and I’ll do whatever it takes to get that sassafras feeling!” A few moments later, she “Lady-and-the-Tramps” a spaghetti noodle with a stolen bicycle, does a tumbling pass, takes off in flight like Peter Pan, then lands comfortably in a convertible where two pugs are riding shotgun. The commercial lasts longer than it needs to, takes place with no context, and is stuffed to the brim with surreal gags paced a mile a minute. It’s a non-sequitur that lacks an antecedent. For all you know, the whole series could be like this.
Of course, the show is not one twelve-episode commercial for Latrisse DuVois Hair Products (by Gary!). It’s the story of Maria (played by Maria Bamford), an actor and comedian who struggles to manage her Bipolar II — a mood disorder characterized by deep depression punctuated with hypomanic episodes. This commercial exhibits telltale symptoms of hypomania: frenetic cheerfulness; unearned but unshakeable confidence (so many hair-flips); quick, associative movement from idea to idea; and reckless behavior, like driving a convertible backwards at top speed. It’s fun, but disquietingly fragile, like a superball dipped in liquid nitrogen. One good drop and it could shatter.

When I was diagnosed with Bipolar II, at 22, I learned first-hand about hypomania. It feels like your brain is full of electricity, every idea is ingenious, and you have more energy than you can manage. I could run six miles in the middle of the night and then bake enough pita bread to last me for months. I would spend hundreds of dollars at a time even though I didn’t have a job (it felt like the right thing to do at the time). I couldn’t get a job or get to class — I was a de facto college dropout — but I could clean and clean and clean. The grout in my bathroom was whiter than the audience at a Celtic Woman concert.
All of this energy eventually trips a breaker and I’d shut down. I’d stay in bed for days at a time, feeling helpless and ashamed that I couldn’t function the way my friends and family could. I couldn’t even muster up the energy up to distract myself with television, which meant that most of the time I lived in my own head. That’s when suicidality crept up, first as a passing thought, and then as a constantly recurring daydream. My doctor recognized the signs and sent me to the hospital for treatment with industrial-strength mood stabilizers. I’m lucky.

When I was evened out and well enough to take care of myself, I did the unpleasant work of puzzling my life back together. I got a low-paying job, worked to repair broken or neglected relationships, made plans to finish my undergraduate degree, and tried to restart my creative life without driving myself to relapse.

Lady Dynamite follows Maria through this same arc: onset, hospitalization, resumption. Each episode skips through time, pulling a storyline from each phase: the candy-colored but volatile past, the quiet blue limbo in Duluth, and the unfiltered, stuttering present. Rather than having B- and C-plots for its supporting characters, the viewer spends nearly every moment with Maria. The result is an unusually intimate look inside a protagonist’s head. I recognized myself in moments here and there; the show certainly captures the slow-boiling chaos and the dreary inertness I experienced, and some interactions between Maria and her friends and family were eerily familiar. But for me, the most meaningful part of this show was to see a television character elbow her way through life the same way I do: clomping toward some kind of normalcy, guarding the tender spots on my ribs, and taking the long way around to avoid stepping anyone else’s toes.
Maria’s life post-hospitalization is a wobbly balance of re-entry, atonement, and self-care. She wants to right wrongs of her past (like kneeing Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath straight in the shrinky dinks) and to relaunch her career, but she doesn’t want to trigger her hypomania. Most of her foibles — wariness of her own instincts, dithering in the face of big decisions, struggling to maintain relationships — stem from her constant self-dissection, and her quest to balance her needs against others’ expectations. She miscalculates often, then swerves wildly to correct course. The show, with its constant cycling back to hypomania and hospitalization, suggests that behind every misadventure is a threat of relapse. How can it get away with this and still make us laugh?

Television characters with mental illness pop into and out of sitcoms as punchlines, as cautionary tales, as devices for proselytization, or to teach other characters a life lesson. Lady Dynamite largely rejects these lenses: it adopts a first-person perspective on mental illness. This perspective, and Maria Bamford’s real-life experience with Bipolar II, allow the show to poke around at depression, mania, and suicidality with refreshing frankness. You don’t need to have been hospitalized to understand the jokes, because the mental hospital is just another place for people to be themselves. The show’s insistence on this humanity does the remarkable: it conjures sunny humor out of the dark.

I grew up in the long shadow of Jessie Spano’s pill addiction, which began and ended in one half-hour of Saved by the Bell. Until that episode, no one would have thought that she might have a substance abuse problem. And afterward, no one in the gang referred back to it or acknowledged that it happened. Jessie — along with her innumerable counterparts who have been talked off ledges, peeled from their couches, reluctantly detoxed, forcibly committed, or cured by a single kiss — reveals our cultural preconceptions about mental illness more than she shows the experience of it. We see complicated incidents and complicating behaviors, written for their special patina of pathos or danger. We rarely see rich lives that stretch into the past and the future.

We all have our sweeps episodes. I had my shoelaces and belt confiscated; I was cheerfully encouraged to participate in arts-and-crafts time with a pair of rounded scissors; I had fraught interactions with friends and family who struggled to understand; I had my own anxieties about relapse. In real life, though, no end credit comes to reset your experiences or identity. I still live with a mental illness. And, like Lady Dynamite, the scope of my survival extends beyond my mental state: it includes my love and my work; my successes and my mistakes; my silliness and my dreams about the future. I grapple with my own blue-tinged Duluth, but that’s only part of my story.
Maybe I’m projecting my own feelings onto this show; maybe that’s what a viewer is supposed to do. But I sense a kind of urgency underwriting Lady Dynamite, from its wild absurdity to its slow realism: an urgency to convey the wholeness of survival, to assert that it isn’t all for nothing. It’s a joy to see a television show do this with such a sense of knowingness, and to see it cast a gleeful lifeline out to those who may not know there’s something on the other side. Maria’s experience and mine aren’t the same, and our experiences may be more or less fraught than others’. Still, there is a kernel of universality: these are our lives, the show seems to say, and we’ll do whatever it takes to get that sassafras feeling.
[Watch Lady Dynamite on Netflix]
[Photos: Netflix]
Sebastian Deken has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. He lives in New York with his zero cats. Watch him live-tweet his inexorable march toward death: @sebsational.