No Sitcom Handles Politics as Well as ‘One Day at a Time’

We live in politicized times. That’s kind of a “duh” statement because every time has been politicized. The difference now is that our pop culture, specifically our sitcoms, are directly interacting with politics in real-time. That wasn’t the default in the ’90s or ’00s (find me a Friends episode specifically about healthcare reform–and I don’t mean the episode where Monica and Rachel committed insurance fraud by swapping identities). Today’s shows have a lot more in common with mid-run Golden Girls, where the leads tackled everything from homelessness to AIDS, or the commentary of Norman Lear’s ’70s work, like Maude and All in the Family. The sitcoms of 2019 aren’t just aware of what’s going on in 2019, they’re engaging with it. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the show doing the best job is a revival of an old Lear show: One Day at a Time.

Politics are all over sitcoms, specifically–surprisingly!–the multi-cam sitcom. A lot of TV studios are bringing in audiences of tourists and eager laughers to watch a sitcom taping, and then serving them shows that are more like hard-hitting news. Roseanne had its whole Trump thing before she overdosed on opioids, Murphy Brown had a #MeToo moment, Last Man Standing remained proudly conservative, The Neighborhood deals with racism every single week, and Will & Grace had a gay conversion camp episode. Hell, ICE deported characters on both The Conners and Murphy Brown this TV season! You can get your news via three ways: cable, podcasts, or bingeing sitcoms.

One Day at a Time isn’t revolutionary because it talks about issues like gun control, mental health, or gender identities. One Day at a Time is revolutionary because, unlike every other show out there, it lets characters talk.

That’s the difference, because the subject matter is all the same. ODaaT Season 3 has an episode about teen sex (so did The Conners), gentrification (so did The Neighborhood), addiction (so did Roseanne), and sexual harassment (so did Murphy Brown and Will & Grace). The difference is that One Day at a Time digs deeper than every other show, giving us multi-faceted storylines starring characters with subtly-to-drastically different points of view.

Look at the should-be-taught-in-screenwriting-classes #MeToo scene from the ODaaT Season 3 episode “Outside.” The middle of the episode, written by showrunners Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce, is an 11 minute talk that runs circles around what every other TV show is trying to do right now. The setup is simple: Penelope (Justina Machado) discovered her son’s Finsta (which is a thing that makes me feel very old) and sees a pic of him honking his date Chloe’s boob. It starts there, and it spirals slightly out of control with a familiar realism, pulling in talking points about street harassment, consent, toxic masculinity, and more. This is how families talk about these serious issues, with stray comments opening up painful tangents, exposing hidden truths.

The beauty of this scene, which takes up half of the episode’s running time, is how it lets every single character have their say. Alex doesn’t get what the big deal is. Penelope wants to make sure that she’s not raising a son who will cross boundaries with women, but she understands how confusing consent can be. But her proud feminist daughter Elena ain’t hearing that, since girls are policed for what they wear and what they say when it’d be way easier to just tell boys to not rape. Lydia, a woman from a different culture and a different time altogether, brags about how much street harassment she used to get and tells a story that she thinks is romantic but Penelope says “is the plot of Taken 2.” And throughout it all there’s Schneider, taking the role of the smug but well-meaning ally who finds out maybe he doesn’t know anything at all.

It’s. Deep. And it gets deeper when Elena and Penelope both tell harassment stories, one that happened to Elena and her significant other Syd just a few nights ago, and another that happened to Penelope back when she was in the army. The terror of physical, sexual violence is real for these women and non-binary people everywhere, from work to the bus and every in between.

If all that sounds heavy, too heavy for a family sitcom, know that One Day at a Time balances all of that with jokes. Solid jokes. Great jokes. Literal laugh-out-loud jokes. I counted easily two dozen jokes in that 11-minute stretch, every single one of them a piece of earnest character reaction. There’s Elena calling her grandmother an “enabler of toxic masculinity,” to which Lydia replies, “Oh please, I do not enable toxic men. I clean Papito’s room twice a day.” There’s Schneider’s sincerely worried reaction when he hears Syd and Elena talk about enthusiastic consent: “Oh, I’ve never gotten one of those.” And after Elena’s terrifying story of getting followed down the street and Alex saying he wants to kill those guys, Lydia breaks the tension by saying, “I don’t want you to bloody your beautiful hands! I will do it!”

That one line gets two laughs, by the way. The jokes don’t stop just because this is a Very Special Episode, but they also don’t feel tasteless. They work because the writers and performers know these characters, their points of view. That’s what comedy is, and it shouldn’t be any different whether the characters are talking about a driving test, blowing money on dope sneakers, or the dangers of getting caught with marijuana while Latinx.

This is not how these talks go on any other show. Other sitcom characters don’t get to voice nuanced opinions. We never got to see how Roseanne voting for Trump affected Darlene, the mother of a gender nonconforming child. For some reason, quite possibly the most divisive incident of our time was treated as only affecting Jackie–and then only for one episode. One Day at a Time lets these serious issues land on the living room floor with a thud, a thud so loud that no one can ignore it. It has to be addressed by everyone.

One Day at a Time is at an advantage as a Netflix show; its network peers have to break up pacing in order to accommodate commercials or a side-plot that’s, you know, not as hot a topic. Free of commercials, ODaaT can afford to do an 11-minute discussion about the nuance of consent in 2019. And with zero pressure to add in a silly side plot, ODaaT rightfully adds all those jokes into the main storyline, which just makes all of the serious talk not only something that you need to hear, but something that you want to hear.

We don’t need less politics in comedy. We need more comedies that follow One Day at a Time’s lead.

Stream One Day at a Time on Netflix