Hits and Mrs.

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This article was published 05/05/2020 (2146 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For this instalment of Don’t Sleep on This, a regular series in which the Free Press Arts & Life department will offer up (spoiler-free) recommendations of the shows you should be watching, we look at three very different shows — a charming teenage comedy, a horny HBO dramedy, and a stylish period drama — that are all, at their core, coming-of-age stories.

 

Never Have I Ever

Now streaming on Netflix

No. of seasons: 1

Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project) can do no wrong in my book, but the writer/actor/comedian has really hit it out of the park with her latest small-screen offering: a smart, fresh, and surprisingly tender coming-of-age teen comedy co-created by Kaling and Mindy Project co-collaborator Lang Fisher.

Never Have I Ever, which arrived on Netflix on April 27, follows Devi Vishwakumar (Canadian-Tamil actor Maitreyi Ramakrishnan in a breakout role), a 15-year-old Indian-American sophomore from Sherman Oaks, Calif., who desperately wants to start fresh after a turbulent, trauma-filled freshman year. Devi decides that she and her best friends, theatre nerd Eleanor Wong (Ramona Young) and science geek Fabiola Torres (Lee Rodriguez), need boyfriends, and she sets her sights on Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet), the hottest boy in school. Of course, things don’t go according to plan, owing mostly to Devi’s extremely short fuse.

If you were to cast a narrator for a story about three teenage girls of colour, would you pick American tennis legend John McEnroe? Because that is the bizarre — and unexpectedly delightful — stylistic choice Kaling made, a big swing that frequently pays off in both comedic timing and poignancy.

Kaling is famously a fan of the rom-com, so the 10-episode arc follows the conventions of one — including a will-they, won’t-they between Devi and her nemesis, the smart, rich and very misunderstood Ben Gross (Jaren Lewison).

But Never Have I Ever also dives deep into the cultural push-and-pull faced by first-generation kids, how grief and trauma have a way of bursting to the surface the more you try to stuff them down, the ups and downs of teenage friendships, which can often be more passionate than teenage crushes, and the general hallway humiliations of high school. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, but you will absolutely need tissues for that doozy of a season finale.

 

Mrs. Fletcher

Now streaming on Crave

No. of seasons: 1

Based on the 2017 novel by the same name by Tom Perrotta (author of The Leftovers, also adapted into an HBO series), Mrs. Fletcher is one of those classic HBO shows (read: lots of nudity) that will leave you wanting more.

When we first meet divorcée Eve Fletcher (Kathryn Hahn), she’s about to send her oafish only son Brendan (Jackson White) off to college. She’s staring down the barrel of a midlife crisis and the sweet horrible freedom of an empty nest. Instead of embracing the suggestions offered in condescending listicles about how to embrace her “empty best,” however, Eve becomes low-key addicted to internet porn, ushering in the sexual awakening she didn’t have as a young, married mom.

Brendan, meanwhile, is learning that just because he was the popular guy in high school doesn’t mean he’ll enjoy the same status in college. (There’s a cringing bit of symmetry between the two storylines; in the first episode, Eve overhears her son talking dirty to a girlfriend who came by to give him a “goodbye present.” In the last episode, it’s Brendan who gets an earful.)

Hahn delivers a command performance as Eve, a woman who is starting to push past those self-imposed barriers that keep her hemmed in. White, too, is excellent as Brendan, who truly believes he’s a Nice Guy despite all the evidence to the contrary.

 

Mrs. America

New episodes air Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on FX; streaming on FX Now Canada

No of seasons: 1

This prestige drama loosely based on the real-life movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment is one of those shows that has everyone in it, but Cate Blanchett is icily luminous as Phyllis Schlafly, who led the backlash against the ERA and has been called, variously, “the sweetheart of the silent majority” and the “godmother of modern conservatism.” She’s the titular Mrs. America to Gloria Steinem’s Ms.

What makes Schlafly so infuriating, so frustrating and so compelling, is that she’s a series of contradictions. She’s fighting for the cornerstones of the traditional American home — marriage, motherhood — which she sees as being under siege by those noisy, amoral libbers; and yet, she’s also an ambitious career woman and gifted public speaker whose domestic duties are mostly fulfilled by the black women she hires as help. She claims she’s never suffered sexism, but then is asked to be a stenographer in a meeting with a bunch of men who make the decisions. She’s a grassroots activist, playing for the other team. She’s trying to smash the glass ceiling without acknowledging its existence. She wants power, but she also wants the protection — and approval — of men.

Each episode of Mrs. America, which premièred April 15, examines the culture wars of the 1970s through the perspective of a different woman, including the second-wave feminists who were battling for equal reproductive rights, such as Steinem (Rose Byrne), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman) and Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.

In 2016, many people wondered why so many white women in America voted for Trump. Mrs. America offers some answers.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti