Bamford balances reality, absurdity
LOS ANGELES — One of the great advantages to living in the 21st century is that Maria Bamford’s “Lady Dynamite,” a giddy comedy of mental challenges and spiritual optimism, is on TV. To remind you of this fact, a second season recently began streaming on Netflix.
Given that her series, a fractured reflection of Bamford’s own experiences, is largely about what it means to do well in life and work, she has her own definition of success.
“There’s what I say I hope success is,” the comedian says as she sits on the back patio of an Altadena, Calif., coffeehouse, “which is to be a regular, good human being. I hope that my friends and family and community are more important than ... job stuff, but I don’t know if my actions belie that. Because there is something very heady about feeling unconditional positive regard from strangers.”
She continues in the friendly tones of a product of northern Minnesota. “There’s a lack of intimacy. I don’t have to take out the garbage or watch our old pug Betty so she doesn’t commit suicide into the pool — everyday things that are much less interesting. From what I can tell real intimacy is, you’re supposed to be committed, and there’s sort of a boredom and irritation with that. That comes with work stuff, too, but sometimes the reward, especially in show business, is so over the top that it’s compelling.”
Showrunner Pam Brady, who co-created the series with Mitch Hurwitz (“Arrested Development”), believes Netflix and Bamford, both of whom she calls “fearless,” found each other at the right time.
“What would happen if Maria put a show on NBC?” Brady asks rhetorically in a phone interview. “She’d be the goofy friend who works in an ad agency, maybe a cop. It just wouldn’t work.”
“Lady Dynamite” is something much better, if harder to grasp. Like Bamford’s stand-up, it’s a work of calibrated chaos, of swinging moods, different voices, shifting gears. Exuberant, smart, strange and surreal, it embodies an overactive mind triangulating its own position in the universe.
Developing that vision wasn’t easy, Brady says: “How do we get the feel, because she does this better than anyone I’ve ever seen, of absurdity and reality? How do you get the feel of tragedy, almost, with her comedy being so grounded and at the same time Monty Python absurd, where animals talk and she can go to space? And also the slipperiness of memory — are we all unreliable narrators of our own stories, and how does that impact our present?”
Like the first season, which skipped between timelines representing manic, depressed and healing phases in the onset and aftermath of a mental breakdown — based on Bamford’s own experience of bipolar II disorder — the new one comes in three interlocking parts.
It reaches further back into the past, to her teenage years in Duluth, and jumps into a future in which she has a show of her own, “Maria Bamford Is Nuts!” on a Netflix-like streaming channel, belonging to inventor Elon Musk and run by a computer named Don Jr. (“This content will fulfill many quadrants of our algorithm.”)
“We’re telling the story of a woman with mental illness in a world that’s crazy,” Brady says. “But I think what the show more than anything is about is her progress into adulthood.”
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