SMILF Season 2 Review

One of the nicer surprises of 2017 (particularly given the level of the network) was Showtime’s SMILF. Almost entirely springing from the mind of Frankie Shaw, it dealt a single, twenty-ish mother raising a toddler on the Southside of Boston. Bridget quickly moved away from the level of heroines we tend to see in Showtime series to an engaging and positive woman trying to find her own way with her family and friends. The first season played very well, but we’ve had to wait entire calendar year for Shaw to come up with Season 2. It’s not as worth as the wait for Atlanta was, but it’s nearly as engaging.

For those who were uncomfortable with the acronym of the series last year, Shaw has changed it to stand for ‘Single Mom Is Losing Faith’. And Bridget has every reason to be this season. She spent a good chunk of last year trying to track down her abusive father, and this year she ends up finding that he has died without her ever able to confront him. Even worse, her stepfather, one of the few positive influences in her life, committed suicide in the season premiere, inadvertently dying in front of her son. This has come as a body blow to her mother Tootie (Rosie O’Donnell finally seems to have hit the sweet spot for the character she spent most year building up), who has always had mental issues, and has now started to swing towards genuine melancholy.

Indeed, everybody around Frankie seems to be sinking quite a bit. Ally (Connie Britton) the affluent mother who Bridget worked for as a tutor/babysitter learned in the premiere that her husband was cheating on her. Last night, she seemed to be in a level of despair as well on her birthday, which ended in a surreal scene with Bridget where she rehearsed what she would tell her husband, did Xanax with Bridget, and ended up firing her. The final scene ended in a montage which wouldn’t have been out of place in Atlanta where Bridget went into a church, had a very druggy conversation with the Virgin Mary (“you got such a raw deal”) and ended up trying to steal one of the icons from the church.

The level of sleaze that I initially feared SMILF would have when I initially reviewed it, is there to a degree – the second episode opens with her bathing in a tub of milk to get rid of a rash. But there’s a genuine sense of optimism and something to admire about Bridget and most of the characters on this series that has been painfully lacking in so many of the series on Showtime. It might be an exaggeration to mention it in the same breath as Atlanta – it’s good, but nowhere near as good – but it does have many of the same principle – that of the poverty driven people trying to get by in a society that has mainly passed them by. The fact that so many of the stars and creative forces behind it are women is something to be appreciated as well.

It’s not a perfect series. The show still has a ways to go when it comes to balancing the characters. Raffi and Nelson, Bridget’s baby daddy and girlfriend haven’t really appeared to their full potential yet, and the series is still struggling to find a way to adequately use Raven Goodwin, who has now been promoted to series regular. But much like its plucky heroine, SMILF grows on you with each successive episode. And unlike the title character, with each episode I’m gaining faith.

My score: 4 stars.