Some successful television show reboots are impervious to the notion of a ‘best before’ date
▶ The original run of ‘One Day at a Time’ ended in 1984. Now it’s back with a Latino family, writes Greg Kennedy
Like chocolate bars or microwave popcorn, successful American sitcoms nowadays routinely spin off with fresh flavours or added ingredients to tap the nostalgia of the established brand as well as pique viewer appetite for a taste of the new.
Reboots also appear impervious to the notion of “best before” dates, as expired hit sitcoms from decades past are resurrected, such as Roseanne (1988-97), which returns in March with its original cast, and Fuller House, Netflix’s ongoing next-gen reincarnation of Full House (1987-95).
Even Party of Five (1994-2000) is shooting a new pilot with a sharp political twist for the Trump era – where a family of children is left parentless to fend for themselves, not by a drunk driver, as in the original, but by the deportation of their parents to Mexico.
One of the most successful reboots, a critics’ darling with a resounding a 97 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes – and one of television’s warmest, most-diverse offerings – is One Day at a
Time, which premieres its second season of 13 episodes on Netflix this Friday.
While the original, which enjoyed a nine-year run ending in 1984, revolved around Bonnie Franklin as a divorced white mother raising two daughters (Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli) in Indianapolis, this goofy, feel-good reimagining of the Norman Lear classic centres on a Cuban-American family.
Today’s heroine is Penelope (Justina Machado), a recently separated, former military mom navigating a new single life while raising her activist teenage daughter Elena Maria (Isabella Gomez) and socially adept tween son Alex (Marcel Ruiz), with the “help” of her old-school, Cuban-born mother Lydia (Rita Moreno) and her friend building manager named Schneider (Todd Grinnell).
“I have had people thanking me for telling their story and a lot of women reaching out to me and saying, ‘This is me. This is my story. It’s like you followed me around’,” says Machado, also known for appearing in Six Feet Under. “I’ve had a lot of young women say, ‘I wish you were my mom’.”
One of the show’s treats is the accomplished actor Stephen Tobolowsky, fondly remembered as the pesky insurance agent Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day, who plays Dr Berkowitz, Penelope’s boss who keeps a romantic eye on Lydia.
The autumn romance between Tobolowsky and Moreno’s senior-citizen characters has proven a heart-tugging highlight of the show.
“It’s enormously profound, because at our age we’ve had our hearts broken – and maybe more than once,” says Tobolowsky, 66. “The fact that we still look for love and for a relationship says there’s something that is bigger.”
“Love is an enormous thing in our lives that transcends age. It transcends almost anything, which is enormously optimistic,” adds Moreno, 86, an amazing, unsinkable talent whose career has spanned more than 70 years.
Moreno has won an Oscar and Golden Globe for West
Side Story in 1961, delighted a generation of Seventies children on The Electric Company for PBS and later adults in the searing prison drama Oz (19972003). In addition to her guest
appearances in numerous hit series. Moreno is a Tony, Grammy and Emmy winner and a Kennedy Centre honouree.
Still executive-producing at 95 is her fellow Kennedy Centre honouree Norman Lear, the writer and producer of this and other Seventies landmark sitcoms, such as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons,
Good Times and Maude.
“He’s astonishing. He’s at all the rehearsals. People often ask us, ‘is he there?’ Of course he’s there. That’s who he is,” Moreno said at the 2017 Emmy Awards in September.
As the political landscape has changed since then, particularly with the Trump presidency and its anti-immigration policies, producers say they intend to work hard this second season to juggle the show’s universal comedic appeal with the current realities faced by Latinos in America.
“We’re addressing them in world where [Trump] is president and we’ll deal with specific things,” says Lear’s co-executive producer Gloria Calderon Kellett. “There’s an overall feeling and demeanour in how this family feels and how this [administration] affects a Latino family.”
Against this backdrop, the trailer for the new season teases that Penelope (Machado), an Afghanistan war veteran living with PTSD, will be going back to school and finding a new love interest.
For her part, Moreno loves that the new One Day at a Time stands by its Latino roots.
“I don’t want to leave out our Latino-ness because I think we bring the sauce and the passion that is very peculiarly and specifically Latino,” she says. “I think (we) have found a gorgeous, gorgeous balance.”
Machado and Moreno recall the happy day they read the first script for the new series, with both remarking together: “How did we get so lucky?”
The second season of One Day at a Time is streaming on Netflix from Friday