The series gathered a lot of acclaim and awards, and justly so... for the first season. It's a fun romp and there is solid writing and solid comedy lines and situations. The lead actress Rachel Brosnahan is amazing, a genuine talent and arresting screen presence. For that matter, all the actors are quite excellent. The costumes are fantastic and a pleasure to look at. Now, it's not strict realism as far as the 50's world or language go, but it's not meant to be - so you have anachronistic expressions left and right ("it is what it is", "really?" etc.), but it keeps things current for the contemporaty audience who would not be able to fully appreciate the impact of actual 50's language anyway, so a good choice. The central concept behind the series is excellent - 50's Jewish housewife who through exigent circumstances gets to use her comedic talent, crashing up against the social mores of the conservative 50's. The actors are great, the writing is very strong, there's not much not to like. In the first season.
And then there's the second season. It simply runs out of steam. There were already signs of it in the last episode of the first season, when the creators forgot or ignored the cardinal rule of a comedy series. HELLOOOO!!!! It's A Comedy!!! It's supposed to be FUNNY! The great temptation in a successful comedy series is to try to imbue it with "drama" under the mistaken impression that it can somehow substitute for comedy or "deepen" a comedy. It almost never works. It can also be a dodge by the creators. Writing comedy is hard. It is so tempting to simply slide into drama so as to ease the pressure on having to come up with "funny". The end result is that the drama is cheap and second rate, as all substitutions are, and with no comedy element, it all falls flat. You may be able to fool some of the audience or most of the audience for some time, but eventually, it all ends in tears - or more accurately in boredom and a switched channel.
The second season - and the last episode of the first season - devolves into cheap mirthless lachrymose beating of the dead horse of "importance of family", "difficulty of marriage" and as a result you have scenes that don't work as drama, because it has nothing new to say about the subject, exploring the issues in the most superficial of ways - "exploring" is the wrong word. More accurate would be 'name checking' and 'surface skating' themes and emotions - "miss my husband", "miss my wife" "yeah, marriage is complicated", "importance of communication", "listening". C'mon, spare us. Scenes that drag on with no dramatic tension and completely devoid of a scintilla of humor.
The creators also decided to take the characters into unrealistic directions, and as a result, we lose the feeling of truth to the characters. I don't buy for a single second that the character of Midge's mother Rose (Marin Hinkle) as portrayed in season one would EVER behave remotely like she is asked to do in season 2. Just not believable. The situations are not merely unbelievable - the whole sorry Paris centered episodes - but feeling so contrived that it actually feels faintly offensive.
It feels like the creators are lost. They lost the plot, they lost the characters, and most importantly they lost the comedy, which is a capital crime for a comedy series.
There is one other aspect that struck me as I watched the second season. They had A LOT more money. The budget expanded considerably. Sadly, I think in this case, it proved a hindrance. Suddenly, they had money to "do Paris", "do Catskills", "do X", "do Y", "do Z". Except they did it all using only the flattest of cliches, bringing nothing to the content of the scenes except for some cliched scenery. An unfunny scene doesn't become funny because it's happening in Paris rather than NY. And in fact, it's a negative, because it feels like the creators were distracted and fragmented their energies into making up fake environments instead of concentrating on the writing. This is of course a danger for writing/directing - you only have so much energy, if you are multitasking and splitting your attention into the logistics of creating more and more novel or exotic environments, you won't have as much left over for the vital task of writing. And both will suffer. You'll end up with uninspiring takes on "Paris" and uninspired writing. In this case, more money actually hurt the product, because it divided the energies of the creators - they didn't get more creators to take over the load, they simply piled more on the plate and simply weren't able to handle it. They got all this money, now they thought "we gotta spend it" and decided to throw it on creating new enviroments instead of deepening what they already had and maybe hiring more talent.
It's an interesting case study. And yet another case of a very good first season, with a disastrous second season. The only question is whether the creators recognized what happened, or are going to keep moving along the line of least resistance and fumble into further seasons with increasingly paltry results. I'm not optimistic - a bad episode or two should tell you that you're on the wrong path. If you don't change, it means you don't recognize that anything's wrong, as seems the case here - but we'll see, maybe they can pull out of this downward spiral. All IMHO, YMMV.
And then there's the second season. It simply runs out of steam. There were already signs of it in the last episode of the first season, when the creators forgot or ignored the cardinal rule of a comedy series. HELLOOOO!!!! It's A Comedy!!! It's supposed to be FUNNY! The great temptation in a successful comedy series is to try to imbue it with "drama" under the mistaken impression that it can somehow substitute for comedy or "deepen" a comedy. It almost never works. It can also be a dodge by the creators. Writing comedy is hard. It is so tempting to simply slide into drama so as to ease the pressure on having to come up with "funny". The end result is that the drama is cheap and second rate, as all substitutions are, and with no comedy element, it all falls flat. You may be able to fool some of the audience or most of the audience for some time, but eventually, it all ends in tears - or more accurately in boredom and a switched channel.
The second season - and the last episode of the first season - devolves into cheap mirthless lachrymose beating of the dead horse of "importance of family", "difficulty of marriage" and as a result you have scenes that don't work as drama, because it has nothing new to say about the subject, exploring the issues in the most superficial of ways - "exploring" is the wrong word. More accurate would be 'name checking' and 'surface skating' themes and emotions - "miss my husband", "miss my wife" "yeah, marriage is complicated", "importance of communication", "listening". C'mon, spare us. Scenes that drag on with no dramatic tension and completely devoid of a scintilla of humor.
The creators also decided to take the characters into unrealistic directions, and as a result, we lose the feeling of truth to the characters. I don't buy for a single second that the character of Midge's mother Rose (Marin Hinkle) as portrayed in season one would EVER behave remotely like she is asked to do in season 2. Just not believable. The situations are not merely unbelievable - the whole sorry Paris centered episodes - but feeling so contrived that it actually feels faintly offensive.
It feels like the creators are lost. They lost the plot, they lost the characters, and most importantly they lost the comedy, which is a capital crime for a comedy series.
There is one other aspect that struck me as I watched the second season. They had A LOT more money. The budget expanded considerably. Sadly, I think in this case, it proved a hindrance. Suddenly, they had money to "do Paris", "do Catskills", "do X", "do Y", "do Z". Except they did it all using only the flattest of cliches, bringing nothing to the content of the scenes except for some cliched scenery. An unfunny scene doesn't become funny because it's happening in Paris rather than NY. And in fact, it's a negative, because it feels like the creators were distracted and fragmented their energies into making up fake environments instead of concentrating on the writing. This is of course a danger for writing/directing - you only have so much energy, if you are multitasking and splitting your attention into the logistics of creating more and more novel or exotic environments, you won't have as much left over for the vital task of writing. And both will suffer. You'll end up with uninspiring takes on "Paris" and uninspired writing. In this case, more money actually hurt the product, because it divided the energies of the creators - they didn't get more creators to take over the load, they simply piled more on the plate and simply weren't able to handle it. They got all this money, now they thought "we gotta spend it" and decided to throw it on creating new enviroments instead of deepening what they already had and maybe hiring more talent.
It's an interesting case study. And yet another case of a very good first season, with a disastrous second season. The only question is whether the creators recognized what happened, or are going to keep moving along the line of least resistance and fumble into further seasons with increasingly paltry results. I'm not optimistic - a bad episode or two should tell you that you're on the wrong path. If you don't change, it means you don't recognize that anything's wrong, as seems the case here - but we'll see, maybe they can pull out of this downward spiral. All IMHO, YMMV.
