Netflix reboots One Day at a Time

[Vee]

???????

 

 

 

[DRW50]

This timing is in somewhat poor taste, and didn't Norman Lear already flop with a black-cast remake of All in the Family? Why can't anyone do anything new? Between this and that bigot Cameron's show, I wonder if Netflix's overhyped dramas aren't paying the dividends they'd expected.

[Vee]

Netflix's dramas are actually pretty good, but I don't think they planned this to coincide with Schneider's death. It's just a wacky choice to me.

[DRW50]

I know some have gotten critical praise, but a lot seem to just sort of exist...

 

I guess at least Rita Moreno has another sitcom. She was the best part of Fran Drescher's last show.

[All My Shadows]

I have to say that I do not understand why this has to be linked to One Day at a Time. A show about a single Cuban-American mom raising a daughter and son with the help of her mom would not automatically draw comparisons to ODAAT, but they had to go a muck it up by unnecessarily adding a super named Schneider. If they'd just given that character a different name and role, they'd have absolutely no reason to say it's a remake of ODAAT and they could just proceed with it as completely original idea.

[frequentsoapfan]

Basically!

[Vee]

I find it all very peculiar myself, but in fairness I believe it was Lear's idea.

[YRBB]

But would it have the built-in name recognition or even half the coverage in the media? Nope!

 

Which is the same thing you could say for ALL television and movies. 

[DRW50]

Well you could, but the hype with Netflix is they're killing TV and that they are the way of the future and everything is perfect and wonderful and so forth. If they weren't treated as the second coming then I'd be less wary of how mediocre a lot of their output ends up being.

[Dave_01]

Yeah, the All in the Family "update" was 704 Hauser, starring John Amos, in the mid-90s. I remember that it disappeared quickly, before all episodes had aired.

 

Not only is Lear redoing ODAAT, but I read last year that he was also remaking Good Times as a movie.

 

I'm waiting for the All That Glitters remake.

[DRW50]

As for not having media coverage on this level without the ODAAT name attached, it would already have a lot of media coverage due to being on Netflix. The timing of this with Pat Harrington's death is questionable at best, and an existing project being given a pointless attachment to an old sitcom didn't exactly do NBC's Coach reboot any favors. 

[Vee]

How much of it have you watched?

 

The thing is, this didn't start with Netflix, it started with premium cable overtaking the TV market and becoming the toast of the town. From that led to more and more prestige programming on basic cable (like FX), then to streaming with Netflix and Amazon.

 

The reason people keep saying we're in a new golden age of television is because (IMO) we are. There is also way too much of it now, and some things are overrated, true, but there's things on Netflix and Amazon and HBO, FX, and elsewhere that I could never have seen as scripted serialized programming before, as well as stuff that are doing what networks and soaps used to do in earlier days where the frontiers were wilder, but no longer know how.

 

Hype is always going to exist and we can interact with it or ignore it as we please - I often do - but I think it's a shame to close myself off to content based on an outside phenomenon vs. the product. (Except for Mad Men and The Leftovers, I'm tired of hearing about them so that's going to take me five years.)

[DRW50]

 

I wonder if this is why he was going around recently saying that while we are in a "golden age of TV" (big fat LOL!! at that...), but it is too "politically correct." To help advertise his new old stuff. 

 

The problem is that his shows may not have been "PC," but they have badly, badly, badly dated. There's a reason he had no new hit shows by the end of the '70s.

 

 

 

I've watched enough of it. I watched some of Sense8, Daredevil, Orange is the New Black, Grace and Frankie etc. I will admit I haven't watched much of House of Cards, as Kevin Spacey makes my stomach ache, and massive David Tennant fatigue + fans who sh!t on other female heroes to seem cool make me avoid Jessica Jones, but I've seen enough. And yes, some is fine, but it's not worth the hype. It did exist before Netflix, but there was less huffing and puffing about the superiority of it all and how TV is now dead or forced to raise its game to compete with such thrills as Martha Jones plowing a woman with a strap-on, and so forth. It's the new "HBO is the ideal" and "British people know how to make TV...suck it America!"

 

I've seen a lot of good TV in recent years, but I can't remember the last time I saw something that moved me emotionally the way old St. Elsewhere or even old Knots Landing did. I think that the critics focus on location shoots and what makes them seem cool (like anything involving Breaking Bad) and on their own delusions that they somehow created this mystical magical world of perfection and everything of the past is a drudgery compared to today's freedom, and it's just a circle jerk that vastly overinflates material in the disguise of "buzz" and "watercooler." The last few seasons of GoT are inferior to the average episode of Mannix, IMO, pretty fur cloaks and Lena Headey one-liners or not. It reminds me of when the critics went on and on 15 years ago saying Everybody Loves Raymond would be remembered as one of the best sitcoms of all time. Is it remembered today as anything beyond 6 years of Patricia Heaton scowling? I doubt it. 

[Vee]

But I think it's fair to say that shows like those old ones don't really exist on basic network television anymore, with a few exceptions. Everything with that level of depth and character continuity or emotional throughlines has moved to cable and streaming. It's not about the delivery system, it's about where it's at. AMC is the same as HBO and Netflix and FX and so forth, whether or not someone likes The Walking Dead or Breaking Bad or Mad Men. Cable and streaming now do what primetime used to do. While some of it may or may not be to our or your or my taste, frankly that isn't any different from the varied primetime landscape of the '80s. You pick and choose what you like or don't like. The point is that non-network is where 95% of the quality content is now.

 

And while nothing could make me defend that early '90s show where Lear had Teri Hatcher playing the hip Bible-thumping young wife to Robert Loggia(?), I think there is some truth to what he says. While it's good that there is a heightened social consciousness today, especially online, that's also come with a series of collapsing and at times suffocating microscopic lenses - everything requires an instant take, nothing waits to judge or listen or process or talk. People just talk at each other about a narrative, and that's a problem. A lot of the TV you just mentioned would be absolutely savaged today for some of the stories they told - the reaction would be no different than how digital media puts, say, TWD or GOT or whatever under a hot lamp now, and it would also be unfair. So there's a very, very fine line between being conscious vs. turning something into a sort of high school minefield. When Lear was at his best he could do what he liked. I think other showrunners like him should be afforded that same freedom to provoke and outrage today. And I think a ODAAT remake is silly as hell, but I'm sure there will be some Latino kids out there who will just love the new visibility, and maybe their parents or grandparents remember Bonnie Franklin or Pat Harrington and they all decide to watch it. And as goofy as the premise is I just don't see anything wrong with that.

[DRW50]

 

I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of a single mother with teenage daughters (although I doubt Schneider would be on a major show today...the first few seasons of Schneider, anyway). I just think needing to attach it to the old ODAAT is derivative and just reinforces that for all the talk of how breathtaking and brilliant the "golden age of TV" is, it survives by feasting on the carcass of old shows.

 

The way I see it is that most cable networks or platforms have one or two shows that critics like, and then a lot they tolerate or dislike. Once the critics and press get past the breathless hype of Netflix and how it has destroyed the networks forever, it's not that different for them either - they mostly just liked OITNB and House of Cards (which are now old hat) and now mostly like the superhero shows. Showtime has one or two shows that people either used to like (Homeland) or tried hard to like but never mustered it (Shameless) or are still trying to pretend they like (The Affair). HBO mostly has The Leftovers and Game of Thrones. AMC has Better Call Saul and the ghosts of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and then Walking Dead was a fan favorite for some years (not so much now). 

 

It really isn't that much different than network - one or two hits, a lot of pap. And once the critics and the press stop feeling 18 again because they get to say "binge-watching," I imagine they will move on to some other wankathon.