Drawing on the shutdown
Things get animated in politically charged ‘One Day at a Time’ episode
If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, then the pandemicforced shutdown of TV production is the impetus for the first animated episode of “One Day at a Time.”
Premiering Tuesday on Pop TV, the half-hour installment titled “The Politics Episode” finds Penelope (voice of Justina Machado) getting a visit from her cousins Estrellita (voice of Melissa Fumero, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), Tia Mirtha (voice of Gloria Estefan) and Tio Juanito (voice of Broadway’s Lin-Manuel Miranda). But with the election just around the corner, emotions run high and words are exchanged as Estrellita’s conservative views clash with those of the others.
The episode was already planned to be done in live action when production on Season 4 was shut down in March.
Believing this episode had something important to say, executive producers Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce went ahead with the idea of making it animated. So a Canadian animation company was hired, mic kits were dropped off at the actors’ homes and everyone did their parts remotely.
Of course, this being done outside the studio meant there would be no studio audience and hence no laughs to play off of, so adjustments were made to the script. So this in more ways than one will be no normal “One Day at a Time” episode.
“You want it to keep going because animation is just a different animal,” Calderon Kellett said. “So we made the decision just to keep it moving and keep it flowing and knowing that fans of the show would already be familiar with what it is and we had a lot of material we wanted to get through. You know, it’s 21 minutes and we wanted it chock full of conversation and fun. So it seemed like the right decision for the form to take the laughs out of it.”
“When you tell a joke in a sitcom,” Royce added, “when the audience is laughing you’re still watching a great actor behave. You know, there’s a look or you’re cutting to a reaction. It’s all the human behavior so it’s very live in that sense.
“For animation, they’re static characters that sit there and they can react and stuff but it’s not the same. You know, they’re kind of doing nothing essentially so you’re kind of dead if you wait around for the beats afterwards.”
As for the storyline itself, both producers say this isn’t so much one political view versus another as an exploration of how to have these conversations without them escalating into full-blown fights.
“We’re trying to figure out how do we have this very important discussion in the show without it turning into ‘Crossfire’ or something that you can see on any cable news interview,” Royce said. “And we realized that all we were talking about was: How do you talk about it? And that’s what the show should be about. …
“It’s like strategizing how we even have this conversation. That’s the episode. And you know, the conversation does take place but the story is about all the different iterations that they go through of like, what if we tried this? What if we do this? What if we do this? And the relative successes and failures of those methods.”