Tag: Maria Bamford

Broken Relationships and Broken Systems in ‘Benched’

It’s quite possible that systemic inequality was never meant to be more than a backdrop, but, regardless of the creators’ intent, the events that took place in the US over the months in which ‘Benched’ aired its first season have brought the inadequacies of our legal system to the fore. In the light of Ferguson, it’s now impossible to watch the show without seeing an indictment of a very broken system.

Written by Max Thornton.

I started watching USA’s new comedy Benched solely because of the cast. The ensemble features The Office‘s Oscar Nuñez, Better Off Ted‘s Jay Harrington, and the wonderful Maria Bamford. (There are also delightful cameos from Community‘s Yvette Nicole Brown and from Albert Tsai, a.k.a. Bert from the late lamented Trophy Wife, one of whose stars, Michaela Watkins, is co-creator of Benched.) Somewhere in the course of its 12-episode first season, I realized that Benched was a little different from the average workplace comedy.

The protagonist is Nina Whitley (Eliza Coupe from Happy Endings, which I promise I’ll watch one day), a high-powered corporate lawyer who has a career-ending meltdown and finds herself transferred to the chaotic, overworked, underfunded offices of public defenders. As one of the show’s taglines puts it, “If you can’t afford an attorney, these guys will be provided for you.”

benched-1

I know, I know, it sounds scintillating. But it’s really much more fun and more interesting than it sounds.

A lot of the fun comes from the dynamics of the cast. Jay Harrington plays a sharper-edged, ruder character here than he did in Better Off Ted, and he’s clearly having great fun with it as he spars and snipes with Nina. Oscar Nuñez brings the same sort of restrained, seething energy that he brought to The Office (though I’ll admit that seeing him play straight requires a cognitive adjustment I still haven’t fully made). Maria Bamford spends most of her screentime doing her usual blackly comic schtick in the way that only she can, as a woman clinging desperately and tragicomically to her last shreds of mental wellness. Jolene Purdy steals every scene she’s in as sarcastic young intern Micah, a hard-working but no less biting iteration of April Ludgate.

The thing that makes Benched interesting, though, is its setting. I’m accustomed to thinking of lawyers, both on TV and, if I’m honest, off it, as they are portrayed on shows like The Good Wife: members of private firms who are accustomed to dealing in millions, suing each other over legal arcana, and taking on high-profile cases involving high-paying clients. Benched, however, makes law the arena for the scrappy, precarious workplace like failing Dunder Mifflin or little Pawnee.

No one has time for your rich-white-lady crap, Nina.
No one has time for your rich-white-lady crap, Nina.

A sharp contrast is set up between the public defender’s office and the fancy firm for which Nina used to work, and the one for which her tedious ex-boyfriend Trent still works. The P.D.s work in a cramped open-plan office space and they never have enough basic stationery supplies. Their work is a constant struggle just to keep afloat. No priceless vases for the public defenders.

What’s most striking to me about this show is the actual court scenes. There are no thrilling cross-examinations, stirring speeches, or serial-killer convictions in this courtroom. Instead, court is a relentless mill of poverty and structural inequality. The defendants whom Nina and her coworkers represent are the kinds of people who aren’t usually on TV: really poor people. They are homeless, they are single parents, they are disproportionately Black, and they are doing what they can to stay alive. They are often guilty of what they’re accused of, but these are minor infractions usually committed for lack of alternatives, and the reason they’re in the courtroom is because the system targets people like them.

Structural injustice, it must be admitted, is not the main point of the show. It’s primarily a workplace comedy and a relationship comedy, and it mines a lot of both plot and gags from pitting Nina and Trent against each other (they’re opponents in court AND in love! How wacky!). It might be that the centering of Nina and Trent is a bait-and-switch in the style of Orange is the New Black-–a pretty white lady protagonist as Trojan horse for telling other people’s stories. It’s also, of course, quite possible that systemic inequality was never meant to be more than a backdrop, but regardless of the creators’ intent, the events that took place in the US over the months in which Benched aired its first season have brought the inadequacies of our legal system to the fore. In the light of Ferguson, it’s now impossible to watch the show without seeing an indictment of a very broken system.

It’s not yet clear if Benched will be renewed, but I hope it will be, and I hope it will get bolder, because it could be something very very special.

That's not a penis, it's a gavel!
That’s not a penis, it’s a gavel!

____________________________

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. He watches way too much TV. It’s honestly kind of a problem.

Maria Bamford: Challenging Mental Health Stigma Through Comedy

For whatever reason, all the reactionary tropes inherent in pop culture seem to get amplified in comedy. If it’s still rare to find a mainstream comedian with openly feminist leanings, finding one who speaks openly and progressively about mental illness is almost impossible.

Written by Max Thornton.

One of the true blessings of my grad school experience thus far has been a relative openness about mental illness. My fellow students and I compare notes on our medications, encourage each other to get the help we need, even theorize about our mental illnesses in papers and dissertations. Perhaps this is uncommon outside of programs with “philosophy” in the title – maybe even outside of the two graduate institutions I have attended – but it’s certainly almost unknown in wider society.

The more disability and crip theory I read, the more I notice the prevalence of ableist rhetoric in pop culture, from patronizing Hollywood Oscar-bait to problematic portrayals of Deaf culture to miracle cures to the uncritical, pervasive use of the language of disabilities to describe things that are bad.

And, for whatever reason, all the reactionary tropes inherent in pop culture seem to get amplified in comedy. If it’s still rare to find a mainstream comedian with openly feminist leanings, finding one who speaks openly and progressively about mental illness is almost impossible.

Luckily, there's at least one.
Luckily, there’s at least one.

It’s probably incorrect to call Maria Bamford “mainstream,” despite her ongoing voice work on Adventure Time and those Target ads from a couple years ago.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/Eh9vddkombM”]

“Watch it again. Sometimes it takes a second to get it” is not a bad mantra for Bamford’s stand-up. Hers is an unusual brand of existentialist tragicomedy specializing in the use of funny voices.

My introduction to Bamford’s work came a few years ago, when I stumbled across her series of 20 short videos, The Maria Bamford Show. The show is about Bamford’s experience of moving back in with her (hilariously Midwestern) parents after a breakdown, which was not wholly irrelevant to my own life when I first saw it. Using her endless arsenal of voices and her wonderfully expressive face, Bamford performs all the characters – her parents, her sister, old high-school rivals – in their interactions with herself. It’s odd, idiosyncratic, and hilarious (doubly so once you have heard her parents speak at the end of her Special Special Special and realized just how spot-on her impressions of them are).

My favorite entry in The Maria Bamford Show, hands down, is episode 10, “Dark.”

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/SCqDReW8f_s”]

If I had to pick a single clip as a quintessential encapsulation of what I love about Bamford’s work, it would have to be that one. It’s hilarious and sad, painfully relatable for anyone with experience of mental illness, existential and weirdly comforting, all at the same time.

Bamford also tackles the social stigma around mental illness in a head-on fashion. In the Special Special Special (currently streaming on Netflix! Go watch it!), she uses one of her most brilliant jokes:

People don’t talk about mental illnesses the way they do other illnesses. [snooty voice] ‘Apparently Steve has cancer. It’s like, fuck off! We all have cancer.’

This bit is not incidental to Bamford’s comedy agenda. In interviews, she makes it explicit that, while she doesn’t have an idealistic view of comedy as world-changing, one of her goals is to make a small-scale challenge to the mental illness stigma:

[A]t least I can try to change it for myself. Because I feel super insecure and embarrassed and ashamed about mental health issues.

As wonderful and important as her focus on mental illness is, it would be unfair to reduce Bamford solely to a “mental illness comedian.” As a woman on the far side of 40, she has an important and under-heard perspective on sexism and ageism in the entertainment industry. For example, at the beginning of this clip, she responds to a suggestion that she should use Botox by exploring the range of excellent things she can do with her face:

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/GQyPCcuVHiI”]

Maria Bamford is not interested in conforming to conventional beauty standards. She’s not interested in conforming to convention, period. Thank Diet Coke and People magazine for that.

 

_________________________________

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. Once Maria Bamford favorite one of his tweets.