Sex talk speaks volumes in Poehler’s ‘I Feel Bad’
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – In the pilot of the new NBC comedy “I Feel Bad,” 40ish mom and gaming-company boss Emet (Sarayu Blue) worries that she’s becoming her mother and asks younger male underlings if she’s still sexually attractive, or “doable.”
Is that scene appropriate at a time of increasingly scrutinized workplace behavior? Executive producers Amy Poehler and Aseem Batra explained why they think it works.
“In the context of the show, (Emet) cares very little about their opinion,” Poehler told the Television Critics Association press tour Wednesday. “They are these millennials who are experts in their own minds, and she’s attempting to communicate with them in a way that’s really self-serving for her. That scene is completely in character.”
The scene also illustrates a generational divide.
“It shows the platonic relationship between a woman in her 40s and men in their 20s. It’s a really undiscovered area to have those two worlds collide without the woman being maternal or the men being predatory. That’s really exciting,” Poehler said.
Batra, a veteran comedy writer, said the scene reflects her own experiences in TV writers rooms, where the conversation often is much more crude.
“I’ve been the only woman in writers rooms all the time, and that’s how people talk. If I tell you some of the things men have said to me, it’s shocking. In a way, you get sucked up into that culture, because they object to you unless you can be one of the guys,” she said.
Batra also talked about the harsh reality of the workplace.
“I don’t like always having to talk about that stuff, and I think things are changing, which is great. But I’ve had to cut up with the guys like that, and it doesn’t feel good. But I promise you, I wouldn’t be sitting here if I said, ‘Stop it. This is wrong. I don’t like this.’ They would kick me out,” she said. “If it was uncomfortable for people, I like that, because I like people to talk about that.”
Blue said Emet, who is married to David (Paul Adelstein), has a real reason for talking to her younger colleagues that way. (The scene recalls a famous sketch from “Inside Amy Schumer” that focused on an imagined expiration date of female sexual appeal and featured Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patricia Arquette and Tina Fey.)
“She’s coming from a place of ‘Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother. It’s over for me,’ ” she said. “I think that’s a very real moment in a woman’s life to say: Is it over?”