Dramedy explores what others don’t: Single motherhood
Single motherhood in your 20s is very messy.
Add to that poverty, co-parenting with an unemployed ex-spouse and dreams of becoming an actress — in south Boston — and you have the basic ingredients of “SMILF.”
The Showtime dramedy — created, written by and starring Frankie Shaw — goes where most TV series don’t care to venture: the lower end of the U.S. economic strata.
The show, which premiered Sunday, is a candid, funny and raw take on how socioeconomics and gender affect opportunity.
Shaw’s perspective is clear when she explains the title, which stands for “Single Mother I’d Like To (have sex with)”: “The ‘I’ in MILF is the male point of view, referring to a woman he would like to sleep with; in SMILF, the story is Bridgette’s, getting inside her life experience, reclaiming (the word) as something of our own.”
Bridgette Bird (Shaw) is a Boston native — smart and Catholic school-educated — raising her toddler son alone in a shabby one-room apartment with sporadic help from the child’s father, Rafi (Miguel Gomez).
Bridgette found motherhood early in life, before employable skills or her vague dream of playing in the WNBA. Now she has time only to survive, and maybe to try to find another man.
For those predisposed to finding humor and humanity in the depths of desperation, “SMILF” delivers with crass wit, sharp insight and empathy.
Each episode starts with a thematic quotation, such as George Carlin’s “That’s why they call it the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” And the situations that follow live up to these black pearls of wisdom.
At her part-time job as a tutor for the children of a wealthy, self-centered, stayat-home mom (Connie Britton), Bridgette writes the essays that get the kids into Harvard but is the one who walks home because her bus pass lacks funds.
The theme of objectification is explored through most every character in the show’s mainly female cast. But Bridgette’s mom (Rosie O’Donnell) serves as the show anchor.
“SMILF” needs the gravitas of her character because it can often be as flippant and snarky as the title suggests.
O’Donnell’s work as the gruff-but-loving parent who struggles with what appears to be deep depression is phenomenal. She is the embodiment of a mom who sees how she could have done things better as she makes some of the same mistakes with her grandson. She exudes “a life not thoroughly lived.”
The casual conversation she has at the big-box store with Bridgette, or at the kitchen table over a box of Dunkies, adds authenticity and heart.
The downside of “SMILF” is that much is inferred rather than explained. Like its main character, the show buries the heavy stuff under sardonic humor.
The series, based on Shaw’s 2015 Sundance Film Fest short film jury-award winner, does offer an indisputable truth about Bridgette: She loves her baby, even though she sometimes resents the rigors of motherhood.