This weekend while I was sick in bed with the flu, I happened across a remake of “One Day At A Time” on Netflix, and it was good enough for My Beloved and I to binge-watch all twelve episodes. It’s about a Cuban-American family headed by an ex-military single mom raising a teen daughter and younger son. It seems as if the daughter is an amalgam of the two daughters in the original series(she is smart, but a trouble-maker) and the son, Alex, seems to be modeled after the young man that lived with the original family in the latter episodes. I think that sometimes this version actually surpasses the original in character development and story telling.
Anyone else seen it?
Boxing a couple of the bigger spoilers, since I’m not sure if this is meant to be an open or closed spoiler thread…
I was considering starting this thread myself. I loved the original, so I had to check this out. To quote MacKenzie Phillips’ first line from her cameo - ‘Another reboot. It’s not like the original, but I like them both.’
I think having the fifth main character being Penelope’s mother, not her love interest, improved the dynamic. I generally like Richard Masur, but he was ill-used in ODaaT. Rita Moreno as Lydia, on the other hand, worked wonderfully. Holding off on even giving her a love interest was an even better idea than just reducing his role, now that I think of it.
The changes in Schneider also worked in the show’s favour, though the original version worked well in his context…but that context is ‘the 70s’. (This article voices most of my thoughts on that matter, as well as a few other points I hadn’t thought of until reading it. The article includes some spoilers.) One of my favourite bits was Schneider mansplaining ‘mansplaining’…then continuing until he noticed the reaction and realized he was doing it himself. (The Che shirt incident mentioned in the article was a bit too painfully awkward for me to watch - I stopped fast forwarding just before he took it off, and got a good laugh from how Alex finally drove the offensiveness home, though.) I also liked that out of the entire cast, he was the only one who was an undocumented immigrant. (Albeit, one whose legitimized his presence.)
The first few episodes were fairly weak, not unusually for the first couple episodes of a new series, but not terrible, and it did shape up pretty fast - about when the arc about Elena’s sexuality was introduced, probably not coincidentally. Funnily enough, when the idea was first brought up, with Lydia’s claims that Elena and Carmen were a bit overly close, my first thought when it turned out the episode was about immigration, I couldn’t help thinking ‘if this was the original series, one of them would have been gay’…I was not exactly surprised that that turned out to be foreshadowing. (But why did Carmen have to be straight? Carmen/Elena OTP! 
)
I wish Valerie Bertinelli had gotten a cameo, too, since the original gave me a life-long crush on her, and it would have been fun to carry it through to the new one, but…hey.
“Schneider mansplaining ‘mansplaining’…”
:rolleyes:
I think I’ll stick to watching the original.