Brilliant scripts serve and the foundation for this pitch-perfect melancomedy that is the best series released in years. Working from the essential premise of tragedy + time = comedy, but only in expert hands, the production team and actors deliver standard family sitcom clichés in a completely new and "audience respectful" way. It's pure comedy professionalism at its best. A mom dies, a cat gets out, the crazy relatives come over, dating fiascos occur, but none of these tropes unfold with bad laugh tracks, phoned-in-performances, or predictable dialog. Gorgeous pauses of reflection, like setting up a song choice or waiting in a room, become moments in their own right, waiting for the next connection where characters figure out how to get through life together with soft clicks of human empathy. The audience can enjoy the moment without loud or overwrought performances substituting for drama. Laugh internally or externally, it's your choice but you will laugh even if it's just out of recognition. And refreshingly, Tig Notaro embraces her physical self in all forms - scarred, sexual, tired, embarrassed, intertwined and separate - both literally and figuratively. We rarely get to see that from women's roles on screen let along cancer survivors. Bravo, too, to the amazing cast. The real heart of the conflict and soul of this series isn't romantic or health struggles but Tig's evolving ties and confusion relating to her family particularly her step-father who's always called Bill. Jonathan Rothman is unbelievably perfect as Bill delivering the "dad" performance not as a silly or troubled social misfit or OCD outcast as so many shows are doing these days. His quiet tension and reserved paternal love is the perfect balance to Tig's neediness left in the void of her mother's loss, the loss of hugs and rocking in her lap for comfort. You keep hoping both of them could just learn to love the other just as they are ... and then they do, in small ways, even for just a moment, sometimes by asking about tuberculosis. Bonding moments come in strange ways. One Mississippi reminds us to grab them however they come.
