Thursday, February 9, 2023

Gina Rodriguez isn't The Only Reason To Watch Not Dead Yet (But She Helps)

 

I’ve made little secret as to how much I loved Jane The Virgin, one of the 2010s greatest accomplishments. I didn’t love it only because of the incredible work of Gina Rodriguez in the title role, but it was very hard not to instantly fall in love with her work as Jane, who is on my shortlist for one of the most beloved television characters of all time, right up there with both Gilmore Girls and Eleanor on The Good Place.  I loved every moment of her time on the screen, and was overjoyed as she ended up winning every award in the book for her role (except the Emmy because, you know, CW) and I’ve missed her ever since the series ended back in the summer of 2019.

So when I learned Rodriguez was returning to television this year on Not Dead Yet, it was inevitable I was going to watch it no matter how formulaic it might appear. Obviously, it’s nowhere near the level of Jane The Virgin but most series weren’t, so I’m not going to hold that against it. The fact that it seemed little more than a variation on Ghosts (beloved by millions; not by me) was a small strike against it, but having seen the first two episodes, it’s clearly much more fully realized than that show was at this exact time, and has the possibility to be much better.

Rodriguez plays Nell. It may tell you everything you need to know about Nell that the character she’s based on comes from the title of a memoir of a Confessions of a Forty-Something F---Up. I don’t know if Nell is actually that old, but the rest of its clearly true. She had a promising journalistic career before she went off to London to follow her boyfriend and that relationship ended in disaster. Now she is back in her old newspaper but she’s now basically at the bottom. The only reason she has this job is because of the one friend she still has left, Sam (Nina Simone, only slightly dowdier than she was on New Girl). She is late for her first day and things go downhill from there. Her boss is now Lexi (Lauren Ash, more attractive but no less bitchy than she was on Superstore), who has somehow managed to become Sam’s new friend during the three years Nell was in London. This is awkward on so many levels, partly because the two of them made fun of her being stuck up before they left, and mostly because she now runs the paper. Nell is put in a closet which smells bad, and has been assigned to obituaries.

She then returns to her apartment which she now has to share with Edward an attorney who seems obsessively neat and very organized (There’s a reason for this which I’ll share at the end of this review for reasons I’ll explain.) Then one night after she gets horribly plastered, she wakes up to see a man in a suit. It turns out he’s a ghost – of the man she has to write an obituary out.

This is a gimmick that could have sunk the series, and was something I had trouble getting ahead of on Ghosts. The reason I think it works better in this case is twofold: first because there seems a more obvious connection to this than the one that just seemed heavy handed. Nell is in a way as messed up as most of the people she’s writing about, and sometimes you need the dead to work you through this. It also helps that the actors happen to be known quantities to me: Martin Mull played the first ghost Nell met in the pilot, and Mull has the innate ability to make everything entertaining. I’m told that future ghosts will continue this trend of elder actors appearing on the show, which is not a trend I object too.

The second that is there does seem to be a very clear link to the land of the living. At the end of the Pilot, Nell meets the last wife of the ghost in question: Cricket, who is in mourning. The two of them meet and connect. But rather than being a simple one-off, the series seems to be determined to have Nell and Cricket become friends and try to keep going in life. As I generally have liked many recent sitcoms that try to find unlikely bonds between generations (Only Murders in the Building and Hacks are perfect examples of that) I think this is a good trend for the series to build it on.

And it helps a lot that the entire cast is genuinely hysterical in their roles. Rodriguez finds the usual notes of grace and humor that those of us who are fans of Gina knows she capable of. Simone, who I thought was never used to her full ability on New Girl is genuinely lovable as someone who has the very real attitude towards being a mother that most parents relate too. (At one point she says she wishes she could love something as much as a colleague loves salads. When Nell points out Sam has two children, Sam just says: “Yeah” in a way every parent gets.) Ash is particularly wonderful as Lexi, who is clearly rich, entitled and clueless (at one point Sam has to gently remind her Euphoria is not a real high school) but who through her friendship with Sam shows fair amounts of humanity that does seem honest.  And Angela Gibbs’ Cricket is clearly one of the those characters who has both humanity and brutal honesty to her: in the second episode, she tells Nell very bluntly she wishes people would stop offering her sympathy. It’s been awhile since we got this many fully realized female characters in a network comedy this quickly. Hmm. Last time that happened was with Abbott Elementary. That’s good company to be in already.

Now to be clear, Not Dead Yet isn’t nearly in the same league that its neighbor Abbott Elementary was this quickly. But once you get beyond the office gimmick factor of the premise, it’s actually got a similar kind of humor and humanity. Near the end of the second episodes, Lexi confesses that Nell has been getting a high amount of praise for the obituaries she’s been writing and that she does seem to really know the people she’s writing about. There are some virtues to this, both in the way that the dead do have stories to tell beyond the blurb they get in the paper and that there might be value to print journalism that we don’t really want to admit. And let’s face it: those are things worth talking about. I don’t know if Not Dead Yet will be the kind of masterpiece that Abbott Elementary clearly is. But I think the series deserves to get that chance and not earn you know, a quick death.

Note: I didn’t mention this fact because I didn’t want to be accused of bias, but the character of Edward, played by Rick Glassman, may be the most realistic performance of any television character to date who is on the spectrum.  He’s clearly highly functioning enough that he can maintain both a successful job and a girlfriend, but he has enough minor quirks at home that its clear theirs a problem. When Nell confronts him on it, he tells her that it’s not called Asperger’s anymore and that he has certain issues he has to deal with that he needs to get through the day.

The fact that Nell does not treat Edward any differently even after his diagnosis is also a trend I’d like to see continue. In series like The Good Doctor, characters are handled with kid gloves. Nell is more considerate of Edward but she still spars with him about all the things she can’t get around about him and at one point in the second episode when she openly criticizes him about his behavior, he acknowledges it and thanks her for her honesty later. He is aware of his problems and he knows that there’s a right way to behave and that he’s still having trouble getting a handle on.

As someone very  familiar with life on the spectrum and who thinks that television has been having a hard time getting a handle on showing it in a way that the people they’re trying to portray can identify with but not feel like they’re being demeaned, Edward’s character is a big step in the right direction.  I realize that in television and films, subtlety and nuance are usually the first things to go on these kinds of portrayals, but that doesn’t make them any less offensive at time.  Being portrayed on television means not being portrayed as performing fleas but actual characters.  A character like Edward is a clear step to how to go forward, and I hope other series follow up in this regard.

My Score: 4.25 stars.

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