It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
Although Amazon’s finally got round to releasing the first season of Sneaky Pete, there’s not been a whole lot that’s new new in the past week, which means I’ve only had Pure (Canada: CBC) and Emerald City (US: NBC; UK: 5*) to review since the last WHYBW. Sorry about that. I’ll try to watch some boxsets when I have the chance.
All the same, for sures, later this week, I’ll be passing a third-episode verdict on Emerald City, which means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at Lethal Weapon, Man Seeking Woman, Sherlock and Shooter, as well as the return of The Great Indoors.
But there has been one another new show that I watched this week:
Workin’ Moms (Canada: CBC)
Three Canadian mums who have just had babies are ready to start working again. And that’s about it really for plot, although given one’s a high-flying career woman and first-time mother (the show’s creator, writer and director Catherine “daughter of Ivan” Reitman), one’s a no-nonsense psychiatrist mother-of-two (Dani Kind), and the third is a slightly unstable lesbian realtor who carried her partner’s child (Juno Rinaldi)*, you can see there’s a certain variety of experiences being catered for the show.
And indeed that’s really what the show is: a comedy-drama very specifically about the experience of returning to work after having had babies. And when you think about it, while there are shows that have had single mums as heroines and there have been shows that have had mums as characters in the backgrounds, they’ve mostly either got families already or it’s all about the babies and what it’s like to have a baby. It’s almost never been focused on what work is like once you have a baby.
And to be honest, it’s that interestingly specific viewpoint that’s the show’s main and in fact only selling point. The show thinks it’s quite exciting and innovative, such as when it has topless, normal-looking older women in the first five minutes of the episode, which is punningly titled Bare (which works on lots of levels – eg there’s a bear later, there’s a grizzly mum and, of course, they’re laid bare by the experience of being a mum). But it’s not quite the treasure trove of anecdotes and insight that it thinks it is, and frequently it just bubbles along, not doing much. All the same, it was insightful and offered some nuggets that I’d not seen elsewhere on TV. The characters were well drawn and avoided stereotyping, even the men. Plus it had a bear.
Not bad. Not great. Not to be confused with CBC’s Newborn Moms, either.
* There’s a fourth mum (Jessalyn Wanlim) but she wasn’t in the first episode, as far as I noticed.