When Norman Lear‘s producing partner Brent Miller realized there was a tremendous lack of representation of Latino families on television he pitched the now 96-year-old television pioneer about bringing back a new version of his seminal ’70s series “One Day at a Time” to help fill the void. During an post-screening Q&A of the Netflix series on Saturday night the legendary producer deadpanned, “I said I’ll call Rita Moreno.”
The complete truth is he ran into Moreno at a political fundraiser and mentioned he had a project for her. Moreno, one of just 12 people to win an Oscar, Tony, Grammy and Emmy Award, without hesitation said “O.K.” About 10 minutes later, she realized she might want to follow up about what the series was actually about. She recalls, “And he told me, and I said “O.K., I mean, it sounds wonderful.’ Truly, that’s exactly how it happened. Very simple.”
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The second season returned with even more acclaim than the first time around (88 on Metacritic, 100% on Rotten Tomatoes) and ended with Lydia (Moreno) in a coma while different members of her family including her daughter Penelope (Justina Marchado) arrive to profess their love in an attempt to wake her up. It was an episode that found Moreno sitting in a hospital bed completely immobile for an excruciatingly long time (and is much harder to do than it seems).
“I was listening to these actors doing their thing, which was just an extraordinary experience for me. Then along came Justina here and does her monologue. And [during] one take, I felt a tear coming. And I’ll never forget this. I started to talk to the tear. And I was literally saying, ‘Don’t you…’ I was desperate. And I’m talking to the tear like, ‘Don’t you f**king move. You run down this cheek and you are a dead [woman].’ I just said that to my tear. Really, that’s what happened, and luckily, for whatever reasons, that take didn’t work and I thought, ‘Oh thank god.'”
This particular episode has a unique twist where Lydia, in her spirit form, looks upon her daughter sleeping next to her body. Lydia has to make a choice about whether it’s time to go to the great beyond (“He could use my help”) or whether to stay because her family still needs her. Needless to say, Moreno reveals the scene was a shock to the live studio audience.
“At the very end when my dead husband Berto [Tony Plana] walks into the scene and I’m still ostensibly laying in bed in a coma the audience went bananas,” Moreno says. “They knew who Tony Plana is, they knew his character and they knew that she talks to him, she has her little private talks with that character, but they were really, really upset.
“We took it out of the show, actually,” Machado interjects.
“Took the gasps out because, I mean, they we’re talking,” Moreno continues. “And I remember looking at Tony and going, ‘They love us! Very mucho.’ It was a great experience. I loved it!”
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For Machado, the series has been what Lear and Miller hoped for, a voice for an underrepresented part of American society (sound familiar?). Something Netflix itself remarked on with a timely tweet after ABC’s reboot of “Roseanne” was cancelled last week.
“I mean it’s a really interesting time to be, I think, person of color in America,” Machado says. “Yes. And I think, for whatever reason, this administration has talked a lot about Latinx people, and who they perceive them to be and it’s certainly lovely on our show that we get to present an alternative to who Latinx people are in this country. This is a hardworking American family. And the immigrants in my life and all the Latinx people I know are the hardest working, most grateful people to be here and that was certainly the case with my parents when they came here, not knowing any English and were able to send me to school and live this American dream truly. So it’s very gratifying to be able to say, ‘This is also who we are. This is also who we are and we love our kids and we want them to do well, and We want them to be accepted and we want them to grow into contributing members of society.’
Machado continues, “And our show tries to tell all of that in an envelope of love. The way that the family accepts [lesbian daughter] Elena [Isabella Gomez], they way that Penelope has served her country and is now trying to be a nurse practitioner. The way that Lydia dances and wants to do everything for her family. This is an American story. So to be able to tell that story and with faces that you haven’t normally seen tell it is unbelievable and we’re so grateful to Netflix.”
Episodes this season have dealt with overt racism in public with derogatory terms that have were almost forgotten to history to subtle racism within the Latinx community itself. In the first episode of season two, young Alex (Marcel Ruiz) is told by another student “to go back to Mexico” and the family has an in-depth discussion over the advantages of “white passing” latinos. Other topics covered over the season included immigration, mental health, voting rights and more. It’s certainly a lot for a half-hour sitcom that has just 13 episodes a year to tackle, but series co-creator Gloria Calderon Kellett, who is the driving force behind the show, knows they have a responsibility with a continuing lack of Latino families on mainstream television.
“I think I look forward to the day when there’s so many Latinx shows on TV that we don’t have to represent everything,” Kellett says. “I think that unfortunately what happens right now, are people are so starved for representation, that when they see one Latinx show, they want to represent everything that’s them, and I understand that.’
That being said…
“However, we can only represent this specific Latino family in Los Angeles, in present day, with these set of circumstances,” Kellet notes. “So we just try to do that in as honest and organic a way as we can, and hope that that speaks to many people. You know this year I developed another show and I love telling other Latin-X perspectives as well, so there are so many stories and I hope that this show opens so many more doors, so that we don’t have to carry the burden for everyone, because there’s so many rich Latinx stories in this country that are worth telling.”
Of course, leave it to Lear to bring some humor as the proceedings came to an end.
“I think the cast is brilliant,” Lear says “And the proof of it is how they’ve come off here, because they f**king hate each other.”
“One Day At A Time” is currently available on Netflix.