Where do you think you're going?
-School. -Oh, I don't think so.
(laughing): No.
-Not today. -ALBA: Mm.
I'm punishing you.
For what?
For... be-- for being dicks.
On The Mick, Mickey is a grifter and petty criminal who finds herself the surrogate parent
to her niece and nephews, a troublesome trio she's barely met,
socioeconomic distance ever affording physical distance.
Together, they do, or are subjected to, unexpected, sometimes eye-popping things,
and the crassness of the show's humor doesn't, seemingly,
deliberately cross the line into the offensive.
Whether or not it actually does is individually decided, of course,
but there's an overriding sensitivity to its timbre
which might faster be attributed to a softening cultural climate, as we talked about earlier,
as opposed to a metatextual move from FXX to FOX.
Part of this sensitivity then comes directly out of the premise,
that in tracking Mickey's journey, we are ingratiated to motherhood
in a way that responds mathematically to the tropes of nag and henpeck -- with logic.
The TV mom yells at the kid just as she yells at the husband, becoming his mother also
and providing the moral center by discouraging the fun.
And then, at the end, she rounds back for an "I told you so."
She's monolithic as stretched across the television landscape,
ever reincarnated and dutifully catalogued on TV Tropes, understood only in resignation,
and contributing further to our troubling eye toward women in media, and beyond.
Mickey is not necessarily a revision of this TV mom,
being more reconstruction than deconstruction.
The television pattern she instead takes after is that of millennial hand-wringing,
the anxious fascination with parenthood exhibited in Master of None's first episode,
or the comedy of Aziz Ansari generally.
He'll point at something adult-related and say, you know, "Isn't that crazy?
Could you imagine?"
Adults are frequently coming of age in sitcoms,
bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood by making irrelevant the measure of age.
And so, the housewife's "Clean up this mess!" becomes the millennial's
"Clean up this mess, I just stepped on a goddamn burrito."
Of course, also, Mickey clashes with the children's callous affluence,
bringing her increasingly counterfeit street smarts to bear,
but she's also just pushed to the edges of her patience in the day-to-day.
This is the direct route to normalizing motherhood,
where we the audience are just as frustrated by over-the-top irresponsibility
and begin learning how to identify where less over-the-top irresponsibility exists.
Suddenly, the nagging and the bitching makes sense,
and could probably be termed as the 'guiding' and the 'encouraging' instead.
The Mick is by no means a responsible depiction of actual motherhood.
Mickey and the cast trade in often horrifically violent felonies
and neglect their youngest far past the joke.
The episodic structure eschews consequence and thereby erases cause and effect.
This is, at the risk of sounding precious, baby steps.
In episode 109, "The Mess," Mickey begins by lamenting
how becoming an authority figure is self-betrayal,
and she ends by spanking her young nephew in public.
In a show where a man is tackled by a pony so hard he vomits blood
and another guy takes a high heel to the eye, this is the most stunning moment.
It's well-directed and performed, characterizing this expression of motherhood
as understandable but still very much an attack, something uncalled for.
Mickey has room to grow in this unfamiliar space.
The answer to 109's instance of corporeal punishment is a quiet suggestion,
that solving the initial problem set by the premise will be a collaboration,
further suggesting that family is best when collaborative and not adversarial,
and possibly also indicating the show's future direction.
I assume, anyway, that things will eventually get better,
more lessons will be learned, hugs may be distributed.
This is very much a mother origin story,
and while the conflation of mothers and superheroes has always been a standby platitude,
it is also something kind of given or ascribed.
Uh, whereas, Mickey shows up, and she ascribes on her own terms, meaning she also fits in boy-chasing,
or boy-escaping, uh, schemes and exploring other areas of life, into this vision of motherhood.
Star Kaitlin Olson is also an executive producer, and that's a critical ingredient.
What would The Mick have looked like, ten, five, even two years ago?
The show exists in the context of television increasingly penned and supervised by women,
and, and while it's not doing the work of cable shows or The CW,
an imperfect feminist exercise may still have something to contribute.
You know, we don't have to agree 100% with something to agree.
The world is a dangerous place. Nobody's safe.
It does not take "a little boy in a dress" to molest your daughter.
-I use the girls' room. I could easily molest her any time I want. -RITA: Oh...
Whether or not it's effectively leaning in is another individual judgement,
and I somehow suspect we'll still see moms yell at children and manchildren
on channels where the laugh track yet exists.
What The Mick does, however, is approach that same scenario from a different perspective,
one we find surprisingly relatable, all of us, regardless of gender or age.
If we could see where the yelling comes from, why it's necessary, maybe we could, in our minds,
individuate women from that wife/mom/sitcom monolith.
-JIMMY: What's the matter with you? -Where are they?
Look what you did to my hands!
(Jimmy groans)
-(glass crunching) -(screaming)
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