Brand-new old-fashioned ‘Day’ on Netflix
January 4, 2017 Updated: January 4, 2017 10:52am
If you’re going to remake a Norman Lear classic, “One Day at a Time” is a logical choice, because it may not have been one of the great groundbreakers of the 1970s, but it was among the most popular and longest-running of Lear’s shows.
Lear is among the executive producers of the new Netflix reboot of the sitcom, still called “One Day at a Time,” and focusing on a single mom raising two kids. This time out, though, mom is a Cuban American military veteran, recently separated from her husband, raising a modern-thinking teenage girl and preteen boy with the help and loving interference of her Cuban-born mother. The 13-episode first season, written by Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce, is available on Friday, Jan. 6.
Penelope Alvarez (Justina Machado) is still a little raw from both her service in Afghanistan and the separation from her husband, also in the military. But she is nothing if not determined to take care of her family and make ends meet.
Her daughter, Elena (Isabella Gomez), is in high school, a free spirit to some degree but also respectful of her mother and grandmother — to an extent. She draws the line when it comes to her quinceañera, the rite of passage for teenage Latinas. Her grandmother Lydia (Rita Moreno) wants to pull out all the stops, because that’s how it’s always been. Penelope is just trying to broker a compromise between Elena and Lydia.
Alex (Marcel Ruiz) plays the wise-beyond-his-years younger child. He’s a budding con man at times, but a good kid whose boundaries are sometimes tested. Stephen Tobolowsky, one of the busiest character actors in the business, plays Penelope’s boss, Dr. Berkowitz.
Rounding out the cast is Todd Grinnell as Dwayne Schneider, a character famously played by Pat Harrington Jr. in the original show. This time, though, Schneider isn’t just the super, he owns the building because his daddy bought it for him. He’s still a doofus, just a rich doofus.
The show is unabashedly old-fashioned, with a pragmatic application of contemporary issues: bureaucratic indifference by the Veterans Administration to former soldiers like Penelope and sexual identity exploration among teenagers, among others.
The show is nicely written, but just that, and the performances are almost universally engaging. The exception to that is the performance that kicks the whole reboot up several notches: Rita Moreno’s.
In some circles, it’s still not polite to discuss a woman’s age, but since the EGOT winner (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) was quite public and celebratory about turning 85 recently, we’ll mention that fact here — because she plays a woman of 70 and the only issue of credibility in the performance is that you’d swear she was 15 years younger than that in real life, not 15 years older.
Her comic timing is so well honed that she can, and does, take the most modest line of dialogue and turn it into a side-splitter. She moves like she’s still doing “America” in “West Side Story,” steals every scene she’s in and makes you count the seconds till she returns whenever she’s offscreen.
While the rest of the cast is good, there’s a naturalism about Moreno’s performance that transcends the mustiness of the otherwise updated show. The laugh track can take a break every time Moreno is on: She doesn’t need it.
It would be far more challenging to remake other Lear gems, such as “Maude,” because while that was a pioneering show, many of the issues it used for comedic purposes feel too time-locked. On the other hand, being a single parent and trying to keep a roof over your family’s head is timeless.
David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle and co-host of “The Do List” every Friday morning at 6:22 and 8:22 on KQED FM, 88.5 FM in San Francisco, 89.3 FM in Sacramento. Follow him on Facebook. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV
One Day at a Time: Comedy. 13-episode first season available for streaming on Friday, Jan. 6, on Netflix.
