Might We Talk?
Twenty years ago if someone had told me I'd spend 65 hours watching two TV series based on the late comedian Joan Rivers, I would have been convinced I'd died and been sent to the Bad Place, and not even Michael Schur's Bad Place with Kristen Bell and Ted Danson at that. Joan Rivers was unquestionably talented and funny. In all of her incarnations, she was also self-loathing, screechy, and rabidly consumerist. The paradox of Joan Rivers as a feminist role model will always be the following: Was she a feminist because she broke ground for female comedians by surviving and eventually thriving in the male-dominated standup world, then by moving from performer to media empire entrepreneur? Contemporary comics like Mary Beth Barone, Nikki Glaser, Margaret Cho, and even Roseanne might not have gotten where they are without Joan Rivers cutting the testosterone screen off the laugh ceiling. There's an even better argument that Rivers was an anti-feminist in designer clothes who brought female body shaming to levels no male comic would have ever gotten away with even in the '60s. Some would say her biggest late career cultural achievement was to make cosmetic surgery socially acceptable.
While hardly the first Jewish comic, Rivers, like Lenny Bruce, was one of the first openly Jewish comics. Don Rickles, Henny Youngman, and Rodney Dangerfield might not have hidden it once they ventured out of the Borscht Belt, even occasionally slipping into Yiddish, but they didn't make a point of advertising their Jewishiness, especially after network television homogenized cultural norms in the late '50s (e.g., the early radio-TV series "The Goldbergs" got rebooted in the '60s as "Mrs. G Goes to College"). At a time when Jews in the entertainment industry including Rivers (originally Joan Molinsky) still routinely changed their Screen Actors Guild names, Rivers broke with her agents' advice and openly embraced her New York Jewish identity in her stage act.
In doing so, she also helped perpetuate negative stereotypes around the Jewish American Princess, though she also arguably subverted them by shifting the stereotype to something more outspoken and aware along with creating non-conforming characters like Heidi Abramowitz.
Bottom line, I understand why Joan Rivers got to be iconic; it's just that I could only deal with her in size two or smaller doses.
So why did I find the two Joan Rivers-inspired streaming series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-2023) and Hacks (2021-2026) so compulsively watchable? No Bad Place demon forced me to rewatch both multiple times. Is it because they're more or less Joan Rivers reimagined to better fit contemporary feminist sensibilities, biographical plastic surgery that might have met with Joan's approval?
Before we go on, Amy Sherman Palladino, Maisel's showrunner, and the triumvirate of Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello, and Jen Statsky, showrunners for Hacks, both insist Midge Maisel and Deborah Vance are not based on Joan Rivers but instead a mix of female and some male performers. To this, I say they're (possibly for legal reasons) gaslighting us. No one watches Maisel and thinks "Wow, that's Phyllis Diller, Totie Fields, Lotus Weinstock (who dated Lenny Bruce), or even Jean Carroll (sometimes billed as "The Marvelous Mrs. Carroll," whose Ed Sullivan Show appearances Rachel Brosnahan studied)." For one, Jane Lynch's Sophie Lennon more closely resembles Phyllis Diller, who exaggerated her appearance and persona into an onstage character who bore little resemblance to her actual self, though Sophie Lennon's fat-suited stage incarnation veers even closer to Sophie Tucker. There are just too many non-coincidental commonalities between Miriam Maisel and Joan Rivers: the upper-middle class Jewish New York upbringing with the mother from a wealthy family, working her way through the east coast club scene, starting with the Gaslight Cafe, people assuming she's a singer at a time when female comics were expected to be "ugly" (Joan's word), getting booted off stage for saying "pregnant," Lenny Bruce sharing the "You're right. They're wrong." note, even sitting on stools chatting with Gordon Ford just before Midge's breakthrough appearance is a shot by shot recreation of her 1966 appearance with Johnny Carson on the Sammy Davis show (Carson was guest hosting for Sammy). In the finale, there's a scene where the older Miriam plans her schedule that comes straight from Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the 2010 documentary that along with her 2009 win on Celebrity Apprentice (if I had to sum up why I could only handle Joan Rivers in small doses, her friendship with Donald Trump would be Exhibit A) revived her career.
Hacks starts after the post-Johnny Carson blackballing and epic comeback portion of Rivers's career. There's Las Vegas residency (though Joan Rivers's regular appearances there came before residencies took hold on the Strip), the seamless back and forth between performing and shilling on a QVC channel proxy, the regular plastic surgery, the gay following, bringing up abortion on stage before Roe v. Wade, the filing cabinet of old gags, and—of course—the Late Night Show gig as white whale. Btw, Miriam Maisel and Deborah Vance clearly aren't Carol Burnett. She appears as a separate character in both series. A lookalike of the younger Burnett performs "I'm Shy" from Once Upon a Mattress on the Gordon Ford Show. Hacks goes a step further: Burnett plays herself at a doctor's office and her Bob Mackie dress serves as the macguffin in what could have been a lost Frasier episode—the brothers pretend to be a gay couple. Miriam Maisel and Deborah Vance were both clearly inspired by Joan Rivers, but neither show purports to be a biography.
Rom Coms and Buddy Movies
Consider this! For the most part, whatever the real Joan Rivers accomplished, she did on her own. Yes, she had help. Her husband Edgar Rosenberg served as her behind the scenes partner during the first half of her career, but he committed suicide after the failure of their Late Show on Fox in 1986. He thus had nothing to do with her epic comeback from being blacklisted by Carson and NBC. Bill Sammeth, her manager for 2002-2009, played a role in her comeback, but she wound up firing him for being insufficiently attentive. Daughter Melissa Rivers was very present in the last five years of her mother's career, frequently co-starring with her. The question lingers, however: Was it really a partnership of equals? Even though Melissa Rivers has talent of her own, to most she remains her mother's daughter.
Maisel and Hacks diverge from Rivers significantly by centering their story on a partnership with a co-worker. In Maisel it's her manager Susie Myerson, a queer woman who dresses like a guy. In Hacks, it's Deborah Vance's openly bisexual writer, Ava Daniels whom Debra first accuses of dressing like Rachel Maddow's mechanic. Later, the dig morphs into you're not funny enough to dress like Adam Sandler. Fashion clashes are one of the show's running gags. The closest Joan Rivers came to making a buddy movie was Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (1994): a buddy story but no buddy comedy.
The two shows may have more in common with one another than they do with Joan Rivers. Susie Myerson, Midge's manager, went to Pembroke (Brown's one-time sister college) and Jimmy Lusack Jr., Deb's manager, played tennis at Brown. Fwiw, after Ava suggests to Deb's semi-damaged daughter DJ, played brilliantly by Kaitlin Olson, that she might finish her GED, DJ reveals she went to Cornell. Melissa Rivers went to Penn. Both shows devote extended visits to Paris; in Singapore Deb tells jokes through an interpreter while Midge acquires an impromptu interpreter to assist her riff amidst a Parisian drag show; eccentric magicians show up as side characters; Deb and Midge both spend a night in jail, which leads to their making unlikely friends; both Susie and Ava don't know how to swim; under hypnosis Midge's mother does a pitch perfect parody of her daughter's stage act while Deborah's unexpected ghost from standup gigs past takes the form of an impersonator from Ru Paul's Drag Race who mocks the "new" Deborah by relentlessly mirroring her '90s act back at her; full episodes get devoted to a Celebrity Roast; both shows have ultra-competent housekeepers who get some of the funnier bits (Josefina delivering Deb's Ava insults via text message and Zelda's wedding vows); Maisel has a game show episode where Midge's warmup comic gig turns into a duel with Sophie Lennon, while Deborah and DJ fumble their way through the reality/game show The Amazing Race as they lose a duel with social-media comic Trisha Paytas; Susie and Ava's are both obsessive about food/eating; and both shows ultimately devote a full season to the Late Show.> While Las Vegas is Hacks's primary setting with a detour to Central Park and Madison Square Garden, the New York-centric Maisel squeezes in a Rat Pack-era Las Vegas segment. Uncanny coincidences or just a byproduct of being a show about entertainment careers? Maybe more like twins finishing each other's sentences?
I don't know if it matters whether Hacks and Maisel are RomComs or Buddy Movies. As far as I'm concerned, the genres are functionally identical, other than the fact that buddy movies don't end with the two leads having sex. Both genres start with the two not liking one another after either having gotten estranged or their happening into one another's lives. After surviving a bunch of involuntary tests, things warm up, there's an uncomfortable reveal, a new bigger test, and a finale where the protagonists concede to what the audience knew before the characters did: the two complete one another in symbiotic triumph.
Miriam loves Joel, but he turns out to be a much better ex-husband than husband. The heart of the series is Miriam and her manager Susie Myerson. In Hacks, it's the hate, love, hate some more, love yo-yo that defines the relationship between Deborah Vance and her writer Ava Daniels. Given their shared non-binary elements, both buddy shows stray into romcom at points. In Maisel, there's an unrequited attraction on Susie's end for Midge: "Were you ever blonde?" Given the show's early '60s time frame, the subtlety comes with the territory just as the more explicit suggestion of intergenerational romantic chemistry between Ava and Deborah fits its edgier contemporary milieu: "I would never eat A-S-S." Joan Rivers may have been a gay icon, but gays, despite their wont, have never tried to claim her as one of their own. If a single thread runs through the various stages of her career, real Joan was relentlessly straight.
Seeing Around the Corners
My reason I've never considered Joan Rivers a great comedian is she never met one of my personal criteria for greatness: the jesters in Shakespeare who are always wiser or at least more prescient than the main characters and deeply subversive. I can say that about George Carlin (her contemporary), Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Stephen Wright, and Lily Tomlin. Joan Rivers always struck me as only a little bit subversive, an entertainer able to change with the times and even able to give them a nudge now and then, but never fully ahead of them. She could poke fun at social expectations for women, Jewish culture, and male privilege, but somehow she never got out from under some compulsion towards conformity. My take was she had a great comic mind, terrific timing, and was very much underrated as a physical comedian with a great instrument for faces, gestures, and vocal contortions (she confessed her real ambition was to have been an actress). She just didn't quite have the vision, that capacity to see around the corners of her own material. More accurately, she couldn't quite light the way so her audience could glimpse around the corners. I'd argue Rivers was more the product of a changing time for American women than an actual driving force behind it.
I'm not suggesting Maisel and Hacks see around the walls Joan Rivers couldn't, at least not in a big way. They do, however, make a more impactful statement than a Costco-sized serving of Elizabeth Taylor fat jokes or calling out Christina Onassis's looks. In sum, it's women do best with the support of other women and not in competition with them. It's more of a recurrent theme in Hacks (the comedy club in Sacramento, the state fair episode, Cherry Jones's episode, even the saga with Helen Hunt's Winnie Mandel), but it's clearly in both shows.
What Made Mrs. Maisel Marvelous for me
My two favorite aspects of Maisel have little to do with Joan Rivers. While the Palladinos first hit, "The Gilmore Girls," was a tribute to fast-talking '30s-era comedy with its Robert Altman-influenced overlapping dialogue, it was also a love letter to a mythical New England small town, more or less Brigadoon with no kilts and quirkier residents, a throwback to an America pre-developments and strip malls, while Maisel is a love letter to early-'60s or pre-Robert Moses New York. The city is safe (they walk around in the middle of the street late at night without incident), clean, intimate, and franchise free. Even the mob characters are more Runyonesque than menacing. It's a city filled with little wonders. In fact, the only-in-New-York Easter Eggs play a big role in the fun. Yoko Ono shows up in a gallery, John Coltrane guests on Late Night, Jane Jacobs appears three different times, Moms Mabley opens for Midge instead of the other way around at the Apollo, and Lenny Bruce seems to magically appear most everywhere from jail to Carnegie Hall. We're lovingly brought back to a warmly lit takes on the Stage Deli, neighborhood butchers, working class Catholic weddings, department stores with switchboards and in-person service, the garment district, and summers in the Catskills: a disappearing city of connected villages filled with personalized special spaces, a city built to nurture ordinary people.
Maisel can also be seen as a homage to the world of live entertainment pre-internet. Amy Sherman Palladino's father Don Sherman was a '60s era comedian who once opened for Dinah Washington at the Apollo, and the show is arguably a tribute to his world, but Palladino herself started as a dancer. If the show has any hidden agenda, it's her penchant for stuffing production numbers into Maisel's every nook and cranny. Palladino did something similar with a History of Stars Hollow musical in her Gilmore Girls reboot, but it works better here—even without Sutton Foster— thanks to Amazon giving her a movie-sized budget (there are people who watch just for the costumes à la fans of the The Gilded Age or Sex and the City) to realize her vision. We get a Fiddler on the Roof precursor at Midge's wedding performed by Broadway ringers, a tour de force oner of an opening number at a USO show, a trade show musical about waste disposal, multiple routines at a strip club (more Burlesque than champagne room variety), a Catskills end-of-summer staff show, a Cuban club in Miami, a Paris drag show, and a recreation of the Hines Brothers at the Apollo. They're all spectacular even if they have little to nothing to do with the core story. It's enough to make Maisel a meta-musical à la My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the TV version of Fame, or the failed but intriguing Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist.
Between standup gigs, Palladino also slips in a variety of live entertainment venues from a piano player in Central Park, birthday parties, Parisian street musicians, a Harlem restaurant turned after hours comedy club, to a Kennedy fundraiser where Jackie faceplants after Midge starts riffing about cheating husbands. If the show has a secondary message—it may even be its primary message—it's that our generation has lost something. Before the Internet, most entertainment took place in shared spaces featuring live performance. No streaming comedy special comes close to the magic of club comedy when the performer and audience boil over together. While Maisel has multiple scenes of Ethan being babysat by the television, even television of that era gets portrayed as a shared space. People may have passively watched a screen back then, but we once had to watch the same thing at the same time. The show's final scene is Midge and Susie multiple time zones away from one another finding a way to watch Jeopardy together. If America's gone paranoid from multiple fractured realities, it might be because the Internet and gaming (another thing we now do alone) are relentlessly turning us into loners where pressing the buttons on the remote is peculiarly analogous to pulling a trigger.
For a show called Mrs. Maisel about a career-obsessed comic, Susie and the supporting cast may actually be funnier than Midge, whose routines have to feel like they really could have happened in the early '60s. This was Alex Borstein's, once best known as Lois's voice on the animated series Family Guy, breakout performance. As Susie, she's alternately sharp-witted, tough, visionary, foul-mouthed, and constantly supportive. She's also angry and deeply flawed, a woman who couldn't articulate or share her inner-loneliness and past heartbreak. Borstein looks like a sidekick, but she's the show's heart, albeit a broken one in ways.
The show's a hybrid between a workplace saga and a family sitcom. The workplace side of Maisel does most of the heavy lifting with the central plot while the family side mostly serves to lighten the load by bringing out its distinctly New York Jewish flavor (the showrunners worried before broadcast that Maisel's appeal was too narrowly directed at New Yorkers and Jewish New Yorkers at that. Not only was that wrong, it turned out to be quite popular in India possibly due to the bright visuals and the constant story-stopping dance numbers strongly resembling Bollywood). Palladino slips in an interesting twist on the current appropriation debate. If you're familiar with Blackface, Maisel toys with Jewishface. None of the actors playing the Weissman family are actually Jewish, including Rachel Brosnahan. All of the Maisels are played by Jewish actors. In addition to making Justine Lupe's (she's also in the Jew not a Jew-themed Nobody Wants This) role as a gentile daughter-in-law who has over-anxiously converted even more ironic, the casting serves as a reality TV-style dare: if you can't tell who's really Jewish here, what does it matter? All the family members also happen to be quite funny. Tony Shalhoub (Lebanese Christian) and Kevin Pollak (raised in Reform Judaism) play almost opposite takes on Jewish-American patriarchs, but the more provocative question is which actor comes off as more convincingly Jewish? At a deeper level, of course, is there such a thing as acting identifiably Jewish?
Rachel Brosnahan plays the titular character (if you've seen the end of the first episode, it gets literal and "Tits up" becomes one of the show's catch phrases). If Rivers danced on the line between being self-effacing and self-loathing, Midge never really goes there. She's relentlessly good at whatever she chooses to focus on from getting the best cuts from the butcher for dinner with the rabbi, to maintaining her figure, to studying Russian literature at Bryn Mawr (Rivers was phi beta kappa at Barnard), to standup. On the other hand, she can't be bothered to learn how to re-light the pilot on the family's stove. More significant, the show is an endless string of scenes where someone comments on how attractive Midge Maisel is. Put it this way, Joan's jokes about Edgar's loss of interest in sex would never have landed if the world looked at her the way it looks at Midge Maisel.
One key to Brosnahan's Emmy-winning performance may be that Joan Rivers is the setup for her character, but not the punchline. As a comic, she's more driven than calculated, something that repeatedly causes her to pay the price for crossing various cultural lines. Being a comic to her is first about being funny and being free. It's what sets her apart and what slows her ascent to stardom. Instead of Joan Rivers, she's a not quite as risky, drug-free, female Lenny Bruce: more apparently improvisational, more likely to draw her material from the room instead of her joke file, and less predictable.
Once Suzy helps her identify her calling, Midge becomes relentlessly ambitious. Is she a bad mother, or is she simply making a choice ambitious men in her time were expected to make? Is she too self-centered in general, or does she have to be? Her joke-first-think-later impulsivity outs Shy Baldwin and nearly gets Suzy killed by the mob when she trashes the trash show, yet it also seems to be her super power. Brosnahan manages to pick up on all those tensions while somehow keeping viewers rooting for her to succeed, though it clearly comes at a price.
Why Hacks?
To be honest, I think Hacks is the funnier of the two shows. It may be because as a show set in present-day Las Vegas, the jokes can be more topical and less freighted with the need to be true to the period. Though like Maisel, the outer-shell of Hacks may be funnier than Deborah Vance's routines, possibly because she spends the first two seasons as a comic whose material has gone stale. When TV was broadcast-based, sitcoms were very much a nightly staple. NBC even built its whole Thursday night schedule around sitcoms. At one point it was just New York-based sitcoms. Streaming changed that. Laugh tracks mostly disappeared along with the 21-minute time limit per episode and 26 episodes per season. I'd argue Lucy only needed to be consistently funny to be a hit. Only Aaron Sorkin and Nicole Kidman would care about the inner-workings of Lucky and Ricky's real marriage (Being the Ricardos 2021). While there are some notable exceptions like Andrea Savage's I'm Sorry 2017-2019, an updated Dick Van Dyke show with a female lead and explicit sex jokes, streaming altered the structure and form of comedy shows; Maisel and Hacks may be two of the clearest examples.
Maisel episodes run roughly an hour, the length of traditional TV dramas. Hacks episode are generally 30 to 35 minutes, closer to sitcom length but still 50 percent longer. Both shows have sitcom elements, but neither show focuses strictly on laughs. Consider Ava using a wax museum statue of Deborah to bypass face recognition on Deb's phone or Suzy masquerading as a plumber in the Catskills: both could have been I Love Lucy plots. Yet, it would have been the heart of a Lucy episode, while in streaming comedy they remain interludes in a larger story.
They're both about comics, but they also venture closer to the "sad clown" side of things more than any traditional sitcom dared. Sitcoms spin out, while streaming comedy series also tend to have a clear plot arc from the beginning, a possible effect of the ten episode or less per year season length; the showrunners simply have more time to plan one. As a result, both shows' serious side is both more on their surface while also running much deeper. Mary Tyler Moore might have broken ground by being a show about a single career woman that didn't revolve around her romantic life. That said, it generally "skirted" more serious matters facing women in the work world at the time: her co-stars fantasize about her but they don't sexually harass her. There was also a 1972 episode about differential pay, but 15 minutes later, Mary's boss gives in. In Hacks, Deborah's battle against gender inequity in the entertainment world goes on for five full seasons. Bob Lipka is no Lou Grant.
Maisel has a kind of baroque quality; Palladino's love of ornamentation and side business often overwhelms the plot. Hacks is more direct, keeping the focus on the Deborah and Ava's relationship throughout: season one they start working together, season two the collaboration bears fruit so Deb fires Ava, season three Deb needs Ava to help her get a shot at the Late Show, season four Deb gives up her dream in order to stand up for Ava, season five continued collaboration or separate retirement. I do think the more plot-centered approach leaves more room for character development and plot tension. One issue with Maisel is the viewer knows she gets famous, you just don't know quite how. In Hacks, Deborah's already famous, but viewers arguably don't know quite where the relationship is heading: will one character betray the other more permanently, does Ava surpass her boss, will Deborah die were all serious possibilities between seasons. Amazon shortened Maisel's run by a season, which may account some for its ending feeling a little rushed or overpacked. That said, Hacks's finale was still more emotionally resonant because it kept the focus on its two main characters.
I also believe Hacks's inter-generational conflict felt more alive. It's not so much that Maisel as period piece was too remote from the present: the better period shows and movies often have quite a lot to say about the present. It's more a matter of Maisel's take on the present, one where all the issues seem to be resolved especially around gender. Midge is incredibly successful. Suzy is a Sue Mengers sort of figure, the most powerful agent in what was once a male realm. It may have something to do with Palladino's penchant for fairy tale settings. Bunheads is Stars Hollow west. In L'Etoile, the dancers never seem to be in serious pain either physically or financially. In Hacks, the present is hardly paradise. Corporate ownership of media, AI squeezing out human creativity, warfare by lawsuit and/or injunction, tabloid driven media, and—of course—the passing of broadcast television all take bows. Ultimately, it sees around the corners a bit more.
The energy between Midge and Suzy is mostly about their being a mismatched couple. In Hacks, the psychology of the mismatch runs a little deeper. Is Ava finding a better mother in Deb or at least a mother figure who better "gets her"? Is Deb finding a better daughter in Ava, one who enhances instead of resents her career. Are they friends or partners, though not in the romantic sense? Deb has employees who serve as both family and friendship circle. Ava, post breakup with Ruby, has a range of hookups and romantic arrangement instead of friends. It's the Harry Met Sally paradox of bi or pan sexual life, if you can sleep with anyone, can you manage to just be friends with anyone? Ava's less-bounded sexuality appears to prod Deb, hardly a nun herself, to explore younger men.
Similar to Midge Maisel, who appears to be attractive to everyone she meets, Deborah Vance is much more sexually confident than Joan Rivers, at least Joan's comic persona. As Melissa Rivers put it, "My mother would have been thrilled to be portrayed by a tall wasp." Interestingly, Deborah Vance isn't Jewish, and her childhood was more challenging than Joan's. Deb remains the rare older female television character who's portrayed as still having "it." Deb arguably has more layers than Midge Maisel, something that may account for Jean Smart winning four Emmys for the role while Rachel Brosnahan was nominated five times, but won just once pre-Hacks. It could also be that Smart has a better agent/publicist.
Hacks may be more closely tied to character development and plot, but that doesn't mean that it has no sub-plots or notable co-stars. In the tradition of Fred and Ethel or Chandler and Monica, Jimmy Lusaque Jr. and Kayla Schaefer play a complementary non-romantic couple as a pair of nepo-babies treading water in the cutthroat world of talent repping. Paul W. Downs shines as a compulsive-people-pleasing metrosexual and Megan Stalter plays his more chaotic emerging partner who unleashes gorilla mode to push their business forward. Lauren Weedman and Poppy Liu stand out as the show's zaniest recurring characters, respectively as America's horniest mayor and Deb's serenely-wise personal blackjack dealer.
Like Alex Borstein's Suzy, Hannah Einbinder's Ava (if she looks familiar to boomers, she's Larraine Newman's—aka Connie Conehead—daughter) is billed as the show's co-star. Both were rewarded with supporting actress Emmys (Borstein twice and Einbinder once in 2025). Both roles challenge that border between supporting and full star billing. While Brosnahan and Smart are actresses portraying comics, Borstein and Einbinder are comics playing a non-performing manager and writer. In fact, this was Einbinder's first role as an actress. While Ava fits the type of the self-sabotaging talent behind the star, Einbinder brings a weight to the task that makes the interplay with Smart more a battle of equals than the Yogi and Boo Boo dynamic one might expect between longtime star and newcomer. Ava is comically woke yet there's also a sincerity in her commitment to her causes that somehow also gets across. She alternates between holding Deb accountable and needing her protection and guidance. Throughout she leaves the viewer questioning whether it's devotion or dependency, passive-aggressive intrusion or tender bonding. Repeatedly, the two push each other to the edge. You often wonder which one will be the bigger lunatic and which partner will be grounded enough to land the plane. While Midge and Suzy grow together in their professions, Deborah and Ava not only grow together professionally, but change one another at a more deeply personal level.
Final Thoughts
When I check in with Tom about Eclectica matters, we probably talk more about TV than about books. I suspect we're not the only ones. Tom and Julie seem to watch darker shows than my wife and I do. They definitely watch more shows with zombies while we've never seen one. My wife and I also have never seen Game of Thrones. I think Tom was surprised that I watched either Maisel or Hacks. Perhaps stranger, my wife refused to watch either show with me. As a family, we watch a lot of reality dating shows, a popular dinner table topic with our adult daughters that goes back to our watching 90210 and Degrassi with them when they were kids. Maybe that's how I got hooked on Girl TV. It's just that I watch more of it than my wife does. In any case, my Girl TV taste is a little embarrassing. I can justify Never Have I Ever, Emily in Paris, and Kitty XO because they have Asian main characters, something I didn't get to see growing up. I may be the only adult senior citizen who's ever watched Alexa and Katie or The Expanding Universe of Ashley Garcia, but I'll never confess to it in person. The world doesn't need to know that I have some inner TV-watching girl controlling my remote. Hacks and Maisel are different: I can actually justify (not to be confused with Justify or Rectify) watching both because they're genuinely high-quality TV.
