The acclaimed reboot of One Day at a Time, which reworked one of Norman Lear’s many classic TV shows as a look at a Cuban-American family, is officially dead. There was hope that it wouldn’t be. After it lost its second home at Pop, the makers and the cast were cautiously optimistic that they could find it a third one. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, showrunners Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce announced they were throwin in the towel.
Their version of One Day at a Time, which updated the version that ran from 1975 to 1984, was born at Netflix, and starred Justina Machado as a single mother of two who also lives with her sparkplug of a mother, played by the legendary Rita Moreno. After three seasons, Netflix unceremoniously pulled the plug, but it eventually wound up at Pop. That fourth season wound up shorter than planned, only seven seasons, thanks to complications that arose during the pandemic. The final episode, its 46th, aired over the summer.
The original show was groundbreaking at the time for being a positive (if not always sunny) portrait of single motherhood, at a time when divorce was becoming both more commonplace. It normalized something that had been long seen as scandalous, and it did so with the patented wit Lear brought to other enjoyable socially conscious shows as All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and many more. (Let’s not forget the surreal soap parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman! Nor its late night talk show send-up Fernwood 2 Night.) The revival kept that balance of tackling real issues with humor. And if you’d like to keep it in your lives going forward, you now have to track it down over two platforms. Rest in peace to a real one.
(Via THR)
