‘Lady Dynamite’ blows up the traditional sitcom
If you ever doubted that it takes heaps of courage to create great, boundary-busting comedy, just binge yourself silly with the 12-episode first season of Maria Bamford’s off-the-wall Netflix show “Lady Dynamite,” available for streaming on Friday.
The show is a mockumentary about Bamford’s life. OK, so, no big whoop there: Lots of comics mine versions of themselves for their TV shows. Just ask John Mulaney, who is one of the cavalcade of comedians who pop up in the show’s first four episodes.
But Bamford goes further: “Lady Dynamite” not only breaks the fourth wall, but the other three as well, wandering back and forth between what is supposed to be filmed for the show and what is purported to be Bamford’s real life. So, structurally and thematically, it’s rather like a nesting doll set created by Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, to mix metaphors.
The setup is that Bamford, whose standup routines focus on her struggles with being bipolar, has just returned from some time off in a facility where patients make collages from magazine clippings. Her manager, Bruce Ben-Bacharach (Fred Melamed), is happy to see her back and wants to line up work for her. Maria is looking to work less than before, however, and wonders if he could find her something she could do from time to time in her own living room.
Bruce is, of course, a terrible manager, but that’s a redundancy in the air-kiss-filled phoniness of Hollywood. Maria takes a meeting with agent Karen Grisham (Ana Gasteyer), a loud, bespectacled land shark who has far too many clients to take Maria on but just wants to be her friend. That is, until Jon Cryer shows up and Maria is summarily dismissed from lunch and asked to take the extra chair at the table with her when she leaves.
Maria is often portrayed in the series as a lamb. Not in the metaphorical sense, but the woolly, four-footed, baa-baa sense. She is in a permanent state of anxious glee, or maybe gleeful anxiety would be a better way to put it.
And then, all of a sudden, that fourth wall is broken and we’re seeing the whole thing as the set for a TV show. Guest stars like Patton Oswalt, who plays a cop, go back to being themselves and, in Oswalt’s case, advising Bamford not to put stand-up in the middle of a situational comedy because that’s what a lot of comics do when they get a TV show.
The actors may snap in and out of their supposed roles, but Maria remains Maria in both worlds, and that’s where the show’s loopy comedy gestates.
You get the idea that the comedy world’s heavy hitters are lining up to work with Bamford not just because she’s great and beloved, but because “Lady Dynamite” isn’t something you’re likely to see on broadcast TV. Besides, what comic in his or her sort-of right mind wouldn’t want to be part of it?
That’s a credit to Bamford’s unique comedy style and endearingly loopy personality — as well as the series’ creators, Mitchell Hurwitz (“Arrested Development”) and Pam Brady (“South Park”).
Courageous or crazy, or maybe both, everyone involved is following the same directive: To blow up the traditional sitcom.
It’s just crazy funny.