‘One Day at a Time’: We’re the people’s show Tig Notaro finds ‘Roots’: Her father was a performer
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – There is more than one show on TV about working-class Americans, and the cast and creators of Netflix’s “One Day at a Time” want you to know that.
Specifically, ABC’s canceled “Roseanne” (and its spinoff “The Conners”) aren’t the only sitcoms tackling working-class issues. “One Day” has done it for two seasons on the streaming service.
“I wrote and deleted about 10 tweets (about ‘Roseanne’),” says series cocreator Mike Royce. “We were all like, ‘If you like that show, you should maybe watch (our) show.’ ”
“One Day,” renewed for a third season, is a reboot of the classic 1970s Norman Lear sitcom and follows a Cuban-American, single-parent family in L.A. that often deals with issues of financial struggle, race and class.
Speaking about the series at the summer Television Critics Association press tour Sunday, the cast and creators reacted to the controversies surrounding “Roseanne” since the revival stormed back on ABC this spring.
“It’s a shame what happened to ‘Roseanne’ because I’m a fan of the show,” “One Day” co-creator Gloria Calderon Kellett told USA TODAY. “I loved seeing the Conner family, I loved seeing (a family that is) not perfect, superskinny, (where) not everyone looks perfect out of a magazine shoot, people talking about real-life issues, family. I think what people are responding to (on ‘Roseanne’) is real-life stories.”
“One Day” also deals with those things, she said. “I wish that (‘One Day’) had been in that conversation too of course, but I think that people want to be seen, people want visibility, everyone.”
Royce explained it was an ad for the “Roseanne” revival that referred to the Conners as “the family that looks like us” that got him almost-tweeting.
“It was bad wording on ABC’s part,” he said. “I think in some ways they were referring to when ‘ Roseanne’ came out in the first place (that) most of the families were glammed up, so I understand the context. To try to give them credit, they weren’t trying to say it in the way most people took it, but it was enormously tone-deaf, and it was bad.”
Royce also found a much-maligned “Roseanne” joke, in which the character referred to “black and Asian sitcoms,” equally tone deaf.
“I kept trying to do the etymology of what led to that joke, and all I can think of is she prides herself on her ‘unPC-ness’ so she wanted to make an un-PC joke about ‘Oh, it’s all the same (stuff ),’ ” he said. “That’s the generous version of it. All those shows, the reason that they’re good is that there are both cultural differences and similarities that we’re Americans, but we also come from our family culture and our nationality culture.”
Rita Moreno, who plays “One Day” matriarch Lydia, had the last word on “Roseanne” and its eponymous former star:
“We work in a strange business, it’s so contrary in some ways. But I don’t like her anyways.”
Comedian Tig Notaro got a big surprise when she took part in the PBS genealogical series, “Finding Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Jan. 8, 8 EDT/PDT, check local listings): Her late father liked being onstage, too.
“He was always an odd-job-to-oddjob kind of guy and really struggling, but didn’t want help from anybody. He worked in fast-food restaurants, did some security work,” Notaro told writers Tuesday at the summer TV press tour, where she was joined by Harvard professor Gates and fellow Season 5 participants Ann Curry, S. Epatha Merkerson and Joe Madison.
“Then I found out on the show he was a lead in a play. That was so exciting and incredible to hear but also painful to think of this person … as somebody with a lot of hope and aspirations. You don’t just accidentally end up the lead in a musical,” she said.
“My father’s life didn’t turn out the way he maybe hoped, so it was nice to hear something about his life where there was hope,” she said. “It blew my mind that he was the lead in a musical.”
Notaro, a popular stand-up comedian who starred in Amazon’s “One Mississippi,” added that her stage connection with her father goes only so far. “To be clear, I can’t sing. I don’t want there to be any confusion.”
On the other hand, Notaro was not surprised by the news that a greatgreat-grandfather was the former mayor of New Orleans. Apparently, he is the subject of major name-dropping.
“Every day, someone in my family is talking about that, so that is not news,” she said. “You can always wedge it into a conversation. It comes up a little too frequently.”
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