In which I was sometimes confused
Mrs. America 1.5 Phyllis & Fred & Brenda & Marc
My main thought for the first third of this episode was, ‘But who is this Brenda?’ Please note that I’m not American, wasn’t around when this happened, so, for instance, I have no idea who the politician wanting to start the taskforce was. We hadn’t seen her before on the show, had we? So there was a level of confusion for me there. (OTOH, I do know who Ruth Bader Ginsberg is and clocked her cameos.)
It gradually became clear who Brenda was, and I found the intro on the TV show helpful. But the more serious point was that even as they tried to set her and Marc and their strained marriage (I like women! I’m pregnant!) up against Phyllis and Fred’s strains, well, the lack of investment was unbalancing. And it was shown up by the amount of airtime that Gloria (“of course” as Betty would snark) and her bloke had.
Brenda’s attraction to Jules/women played off against Phyllis’s knowledge of what gay son John was up to. Though I really did feel like we needed an extra scene between Marc’s suggestion that they tried to create a radical family unit that encompassed his wife’s desires (which nobody seemed to think might be bisexual) and her telling Gloria she was more conventional than she’d thought
But there was more, with Phyllis’s profile, the status of being a lawyer and their frustrations boiling over with both the Schlaflys. Gloria was unfaithful, also freaking out about turning 40 and not producing her book, which everyone else seemed to be doing, plus Margaret, aka her token(?) black writer left. (I couldn’t quite decipher all the stuff around Oakland.)
Neither couple seemed to have prepared much for the interview! Watching Phyllis getting skewered for fabricating a case was fun - even if the sexual politics of the interview was cringeworthy in a way. But the underlying point was that the show within the show tried to privilege the husbands’ view of a topic the women were manly debating, (right on Marc wasn’t having any of it) while the show itself was priveliging the women’s POV.
There was a ‘Good grief, Adam Brody’s toned his tics down’ moment i.e. when I realised he was playing Marc. I feel I know the actress who played Brenda from somewhere, but am not sure where. IMDB suggests ‘What’s Your Number?’ although I’ve only seen that once. It also chastisingly said that Brenda was in all nine episodes. Well, she wasn’t very memorable then, sorry.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/431835.html.
My main thought for the first third of this episode was, ‘But who is this Brenda?’ Please note that I’m not American, wasn’t around when this happened, so, for instance, I have no idea who the politician wanting to start the taskforce was. We hadn’t seen her before on the show, had we? So there was a level of confusion for me there. (OTOH, I do know who Ruth Bader Ginsberg is and clocked her cameos.)
It gradually became clear who Brenda was, and I found the intro on the TV show helpful. But the more serious point was that even as they tried to set her and Marc and their strained marriage (I like women! I’m pregnant!) up against Phyllis and Fred’s strains, well, the lack of investment was unbalancing. And it was shown up by the amount of airtime that Gloria (“of course” as Betty would snark) and her bloke had.
Brenda’s attraction to Jules/women played off against Phyllis’s knowledge of what gay son John was up to. Though I really did feel like we needed an extra scene between Marc’s suggestion that they tried to create a radical family unit that encompassed his wife’s desires (which nobody seemed to think might be bisexual) and her telling Gloria she was more conventional than she’d thought
But there was more, with Phyllis’s profile, the status of being a lawyer and their frustrations boiling over with both the Schlaflys. Gloria was unfaithful, also freaking out about turning 40 and not producing her book, which everyone else seemed to be doing, plus Margaret, aka her token(?) black writer left. (I couldn’t quite decipher all the stuff around Oakland.)
Neither couple seemed to have prepared much for the interview! Watching Phyllis getting skewered for fabricating a case was fun - even if the sexual politics of the interview was cringeworthy in a way. But the underlying point was that the show within the show tried to privilege the husbands’ view of a topic the women were manly debating, (right on Marc wasn’t having any of it) while the show itself was priveliging the women’s POV.
There was a ‘Good grief, Adam Brody’s toned his tics down’ moment i.e. when I realised he was playing Marc. I feel I know the actress who played Brenda from somewhere, but am not sure where. IMDB suggests ‘What’s Your Number?’ although I’ve only seen that once. It also chastisingly said that Brenda was in all nine episodes. Well, she wasn’t very memorable then, sorry.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/431835.html.