Anything at all can get lost in the cracks in the Peak TV era, but as I've so often preached, it's really easy for me to watch just about any enjoyable half-hour show with short seasons. Newest case in point: SMILF, the horribly-named show about a single mom set in Boston (ugh, enough already) where the kid's name is Larry Bird (stop) and the single mom's single mom is played by Rosie O'Donnell (just not my favorite), airing on Showtime (a channel we often aren't subscribed to), that had a warmly-but-lukewarmly-received first season and then all kinds of behind-the-scenes issues while filming its second season that would make Lena Dunham cringe.
Easy, easy pass.
Except, here comes the second season, finally, and there have been some ads for it when I've watched some other stuff on Showtime, and they made it look actually not that bad at all, and okay fine I'll go ahead and give the eight-episode first season a shot, why the hell not.
And, yeah, I liked it. The season starts out stronger than it ends, which gives me all kinds of concern about Season 2, but early on it seems to strike the right mix of absurd scenarios (some of them overt dream sequences) and heavy subject matter (single parenting, sexual assault, struggling with sobriety. elderly depression). The easiest comparison to make is to Girls, because in addition to the off-screen issues and controversies, this is a show helmed by a young-ish woman (the Internet can't seem to agree on whether Frankie Shaw is 32 or 37) who also stars in the show and portrays an often-very-shitty character who gets naked or at least strips down to her underwear on screen a lot. But another comparison I want to draw is to Baskets, and specifically to that show's portrayal of frustrated, sad, and lonely senior women. Rosie O'Donnell is playing an extremely unforgiving character here and doing an amazing job at it - arguably better than Louie Anderson's award-winning performance as Christine from Baskets. She's basically playing this older-than-her-years hardened gray-haired Boston woman and the notes are just perfect even if the accent's slightly off. Watching a woman peruse different brands of batteries at a CVS muttering things like "eight ninety nine, ah you KIDDIN' me?" is a thing I had no idea I wanted to see on television until I saw it on television. But the character is also frustrating as hell, halfway to Livia Soprano, constantly complaining about not getting thanks or appreciated enough for the work she's doing.
It's also definitely a show that seems to have had some real issues figuring out its tone and its characters. It's unafraid to jump into Scrubs-esque dream sequences, as I alluded to above - toward the end of a Tough Mudder obstacle course, Frankie Shaw will just sort of turn into Wonder Woman, for instance. But in the early going there's some especially surreal heightened comedy outside of those sequences that feels more like it came from, say, Louie. Like in an early episode Bridgette seeks career advice and is told to turn to prostitution. In another early episode, maybe even the same one, Bridgette's ex-boyfriend's girlfriend voluntarily stands in line at a doctors' office with Bridgette's kid and just can't stop saying, out loud, to no one in particular, how much she loves waiting in lines. And then by the end of the season we're dealing with suppressed molestation memories and decades of regret. (The girlfriend, by the way, is portrayed by Samara Weaving, easily one of the most conventionally attractive young blonde women working as an actress today, which, again, baffles me - is the joke here that Bridgette's unemployed baby daddy, who struggles with sobriety, is able to land such a beautiful woman? Was that casting choice made in order to give Bridgette a total stunner to be jealous of, or something, before the show ultimately abandoned going for that type of relationship between the two, but kept the casting anyway?)
I've written a whole lot about this show, and I'll definitely be watching Season 2 in real time over the next couple of months. It's not by any means the best or funniest show on TV, but I'm interested in it almost from a "where the hell is it going" standpoint - again, much like Girls or Baskets. We'll see!
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