One Day at a Time

This is one of my all-time favorites except for the last couple of seasons. The early years were great, funny, insightful, and pretty original. Ann dealt with some pretty heavy problems with her kids, found work she liked, and became an old pro at the dating game. It was neat to watch the character mature along with her daughters.

However, like a lot of shows with children/teenagers, they had to come up with a way to keep things going after the kids had grown too old for the story lines. In this case, they brought in a little boy with a pretty contrived plot line to be the new "son". It didn't work well.

I use to watch this when it was on TV. Recently its back on LOGO so I have been catching up on it. I forgot had bad Bonnie Franklin was in this show! Valerie Bertinelli was the reason I watched this show back when it was on she is still good in this show. They should have replaced the Bonnie Franklin with someone else.

This show was a revolutionary in the women's movement. Bonnie Franklin played red head divorcée and mother of two teenage daughters who moves from Loganport, Indiana to the big city of Indianapolis. Her daughters are played by the wonderful, Valerie Bertinelli, and Mackenzie Phillips. They played Barbara and Julie. Remember Schneider who frequented the apartment as the building handyman. Nan Fabray who played Ann's mother. I loved Richard Masur as Ann's first boyfriend after her divorce. I thought he should have stayed on but it wouldn't work if Ann remarried so soon after the divorce papers were inked. I remember Shelley Fabares on the show as one of her co-workers as well as Mary Louise Wilson as a cocktail waitress neighbor. It was one of the few shows that I could recall was set in Indianapolis. I thought the show was well-written most of the time and the acting was worthy of the Emmys it received. They don't make shows like this. I remember the apartment layout most of all. Despite Phillips' substance problems, Valerie was truly a star in the making. The show grew and evolved and was well-loved by its audience.

How can a four year old remember the pilot episode of a show? I don't know, but I do. Groundbreaking at the time, it actually featured a divorced mother with her two kids. Very topical, and sedate by today's standards, this show was a huge hit. Of all the people on this show who would have thought Valerie Bertenelli would have the biggest career? And who knew McKenzie Phillips was on heroin? Totally watched during the seventies but everyone pretty much was over it by the early eighties. Still one of the coolest shows of the seventies.

Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin) is newly liberated after divorcing her husband. For the first time, the 34 year old is in charge of her own life. She moves to Indianapolis with her rebellious daughter Julie Cooper (Mackenzie Phillips) and younger daughter Barbara Cooper (Valerie Bertinelli). The building has an intrusive super named Dwayne Schneider (Pat Harrington Jr.).

The show struggles to find the extra characters. With Mackenzie Phillips' drug problem, the show really only could maintain three main characters for the entire run. Of the ancillary characters, I like Bob Morton the most. He is the classic clueless innocent and a great butt of the joke. He and Barbara running away to Chicago is probably my best memory of the show. David Kane is probably the easiest to incorporate but Ann's love life needs more drama than he could deliver. Eventually, she ends up with Alex and Nick Handris. For some reason, Nick is abandoned and she keeps Alex to give the show some youth energy. Francine is a good work foil although she could have connected with Schneider to give her more screen time. No matter who they tried, the show never fully incorporated these extra characters. For all the attempts, I'm always surprised that the show didn't try to incorporate Mackenzie Phillips' real life drug problem. One expects the dark subject matters from a Norman Lear show and this show has that. It just doesn't have Mackenzie's troubles. Maybe it cuts too close to home.

Overall, I always find Ann too angry. It actually fits when she's fighting with Julie but whenever Julie leaves, Ann is simply angry. She needs a bit of Barbara in her role. Talking about Barbara, she isn't allowed to build on characters of her peers. She has Bob at first but she never has a long-term female best friend. It's not until Mark that she gets a partner. As for Max and Mark, they are great late show additions. They do need to stay closer to the apartment. It seems obvious that they could stay together in apartments next door. The characters need better connectivity. This is a show with the mission of showing the new world of the divorced mother. Despite the many potholes in the road, it achieves that over its nine seasons run.