Did you catch One Big Happy, the new sitcom about a single lesbian having a baby with her straight male best friend, Tuesday night? What did you think? I wanted to like it—but wasn’t impressed.
Because Ellen was involved and openly lesbian Liz Feldman was co-executive producing and writing, I was willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt, even though I was skeptical from the start about yet another storyline involving pregnant or inseminating lesbians. Pregnant lesbians is an overdone trope, as Sarah Warn wrote at After Ellen back in 2003 — and insemination antics are just as tired, as I myself wrote seven years ago. I’d much rather see a show about a lesbian or lesbians raising older kids—which is why I’m so fond of ABC Family’s The Fosters. Still: Ellen. And another lesbian mom on television. I wanted to believe.
Alas, I thought the pilot episode of One Big Happy felt forced and not terribly funny. Maybe it was the clunky way protagonist Lizzy (Elisha Cuthbert), within the first minute of the show, repeatedly mentions that she’s a lesbian, which her best friend Luke (Nick Zano) clarifies as “Big time.” Show, don’t tell, people. Frankly, there was so much emphasis on her being a lesbian that after one viewing, I fail to recall what Lizzie actually does for a living. Last I checked, simply being a lesbian doesn’t pay the rent.
Maybe, too, it was the hyper-acceleration of Luke’s relationship with about-to-be-deported Prudence (Kelly Brook) to set up the “he said he’d raise a baby with Lizzie, but he married Prudence just as Lizzie got pregnant” tension around which the whole show revolves. I just didn’t feel enough chemistry between Luke and Prudence to make me believe they really fell for each other so deeply and quickly.
There was also the inconsistency of Lizzie noting that she’d worn a tux to her prom, while nothing about her indicated any masculine-of-center leanings. It’s as if the writers felt that wearing tuxes to prom was a lesbian thing, and wanted to squeeze in a joke about it, without taking into account the actual identity of the particular lesbian in question.
Worst, perhaps, was the show’s attempt to subvert a typical transphobic joke. Luke says to Prudence at one point, “If you tell me you were born a man … I’m oddly okay with that.” While the line ends on a positive note (Luke seems genuinely okay with it), and that’s refreshing, it still reinforces the idea that trans people were born one gender and then switched. As I understand it, most trans people feel that they were born the gender with which they identify, although they were initially assigned another gender by society. The GLAAD Media Reference Guide agrees that the phrase “born a man [woman]” is “problematic.” It’s even more so in a show that people may turn to for a sense of LGBTQ lives.
One Big Happy was greenlit a day before NBC cancelled Sean Saves the World, about a single gay dad, in its first season. A year before that, the network cancelled its one-season The New Normal, about a gay male couple whose surrogate moves in with them. It feels like the network tried to squeeze the single-gay-parent theme of the former together with the same-sex-couple-living-with-reproductive-partner theme of the latter to create some sort of hybrid. I’m not sure One Big Happy is more than the sum of those less-than-successful parts.
One Big Happy also seems to be trying to capture the “gay person and straight best friend” vibe of the network’s earlier hit, Will and Grace—but the latter did it with more grace, at a time when there was much less will for gay-themed shows. Or is it trying to echo that even older icon of American television comedy, Three’s Company? Regardless, it seems a rehash of old themes and not terribly inspiring comedy. Yes, it’s great to see any positive representation of an LGBTQ parent on television. Is it too much to ask that it be good television, too?