A better place for Lady Dynamite
Quirky Netflix show advances wellness of character. Now what?
Is there any autobiographical comedy series that’s quite as autobiographical as Netflix’s “Lady Dynamite”? The Maria Bamford of the show and the Maria Bamford, 47, who plays her are both comedians and actresses with histories of depression and bipolar disorder, raised in Minnesota, who starred in ads for big-box stores, were psychologically derailed by the death of a pug named Blossom and have found happiness in a relationship with a man named Scott.
The trippy, densely packed first season of Bamford’s sitcom, created by Mitch Hurwitz (of “Arrested Development”) and Pam Brady, detailed her character’s ups and mostly downs in three time lines — the not too distant past (personal and professional meltdown in Los Angeles), the recent past (recovery of sorts in Minnesota) and the present (starting over in LA). The reward for her and the audience was an improbable, inevitable Nora Ephron-style happy ending. It felt like a story fully told.
So where does Bamford go in Season 2, whose eight episodes (down from 12 in Season 1) started streaming Friday? She goes further into the past, showing us Maria’s Minnesota childhood in scenes that, in the three episodes available for review, lack the dark urgency of the first season’s family moments. More rewardingly, she goes into the future, where Maria finds herself making a streaming series much like the one we’re watching.
Mostly, though, she’s in the show’s present, where Maria’s relationship with Scott (Olafur Olafsson) has reached the point of cohabitation. The lessons of Season 1 may have been that fear and mental illness never go away, but now they play out in milder, cuter and more legible ways, with more clearly defined messages but less wild inventiveness in the telling.
Maria has to accept Scott’s poor moneymanagement skills and trust that he’s not robbing her; he has to accept her wildanimal household habits and trust that she’s taking her meds. Maria reassures him with one of the straight-up publicservice-style pronouncements she frequently makes: “I was getting irritable. And defensive. But those aren’t always signs of hypomania. They’re normal human emotions.”
With a few exceptions — a sudden shift into widescreen proportions for a few moments of horror-movie send-up, a laugh track that turns three talking raccoons into retro sitcom characters — this material is handled relatively straightforwardly, at least compared to the constant, riotous formal experimentation of the first season.
But the show goes even more meta than before in the “future” sequences — the time frame is loosely established by a reference to the yet-to-exist “Westworld” Season 3 — in which Maria gets the chance to “destigmatize mental illness forever” with a series called “Maria Bamford Is Nuts!” Invited to a meeting at Muskvision, a streaming service allegedly owned by the car-and-space mogul Elon Musk, Maria is scanned by a white cube that approves a 13-episode season without hearing her pitch. “This content will fulfil many quadrants of our algorithm,” the cube tells her, a determination presumably already made by Netflix in the real world.
There are always hurdles in the world of “Lady Dynamite,” however, and Maria is soon told that she should “tone down” the mental-health issues. This offers the most promising possibilities going forward, as well as the primary venue for Ana Gasteyer’s essential performance as Maria’s divinely foul-mouthed agent.
It’s not clear from these early episodes that Bamford has a whole lot more to say about the compounding difficulties of mental illness and the vicissitudes of life.
She is a woman trying to succeed in the entertainment business and navigate romance in Los Angeles. “Lady Dynamite” is still a well-made and distinctive comedy, but there are a lot of those these days.