‘Mid-Century Modern’ is a nod to ‘Golden Girls’ and a tribute to Linda Lavin
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It’s with a combination of sadness and gratitude that I greet “Mid-Century Modern,” a sweet new multicamera sitcom, premiering Friday on Hulu, a streamer not otherwise known for creating multicamera sitcoms. As the last work of Linda Lavin, who died while the series’ first season was in production, the show provides her a solid platform, I’m happy to say, and that she does not seem at all like a person who is ready to exit this world-stage but is, rather, full of life and in complete possession of her gifts. She is unfailingly funny in a series that if not itself unfailingly funny, is as funny as one might reasonably expect. And because she is so very good, and alive, it is all the sadder to contemplate what we’ve lost. But perhaps I’m just soft that way.
Created by Max Mutchnick and David Kohan (“Will & Grace”), and directed throughout by James Burrows (“Taxi,” “Cheers,” also “Will & Grace”), the show is very loosely based on “The Golden Girls,” as three gay friends — Nathan Lane as Bunny, Matt Bomer as Jerry and Nathan Lee Graham as Arthur — move in together after the death of a fourth, into a house also occupied by Bunny’s mother, Sybil (Lavin). (The title of the series would seem only to apply to the house, a signature style in Palm Springs, where the series is set, and whose gay-friendliness is pointed out in more than one joke, e.g.,”This place is so gay, even the trees are named Joshua.”) There is some one-to-one correspondence between the characters in the two sitcoms, which is worth no more than an acknowledging nod.
The primary borrowing from “The Golden Girls” is that the leads are … not young, not “Friends” young, anyway. Bomer, the kid in this scenario, is 47, though you would not know it to look at him, or from his character, an unschooled innocent who sees good everywhere and whom nothing excites more than the prospect of a Donny Osmond concert. (Jerry was raised Mormon.) Graham is 56, Lane 69, Lavin was 87. Pamela Adlon, who arrives a few episodes in to play a recurring role as Bunny’s difficult sister, is 58. There is some talk about how things used to be, in the world and in themselves, and a few aches and pains are mentioned, but age isn’t especially an issue — everyone’s pretty lively. They hook up, or attempt to. They perform dance routines.
Matt Bomer, who co-stars in Hulu’s gay version of ‘Golden Girls’ with Nathan Lane and Nathan Lee Graham, spoke about why he felt it was time to take on a comedic role.
What is perhaps most original about “Mid-Century Modern,” though I may be missing some historical precedent, is that it’s a traditional sitcom, not just with a gay character or two but set primarily in a gay milieu, its subject friendship among gay men — which has the salutary effect of making that milieu at once the point and beside the point. It’s especially heartening to see this in a time when LGBTQ+ rights, and even the right to identity, are being attacked — a subject broached in an episode in which Jerry invites their neighbor, a right-wing congresswoman, to dinner.
Bunny owns a chain of brassiere stores, the Bunny Hutch, established by his late father, so he’s got the resources to host his friends, whom he has invited to live with him, and feed them and such. He’s the least self-assured of the three, and has eyebrows that are designed to express worry. Flight attendant Jerry, meanwhile, cruises along on a stream of guilelessness and good looks; Bomer, not generally associated with this sort of comedy, is winningly silly, though he sometimes is called upon to be a voice of wisdom. (These aspects don’t quite gel, but each is individually effective.) And posh Arthur, formerly of Vogue, has a firm if not completely merited sense of superiority. (He is offended that their late friend is being buried “in a three-button blazer — and all three are buttoned.”)
Lane is not an actor who has ever lacked for work, but the one thing that has evaded him in his much-laureled stage and screen career is a starring role in a successful situation comedy. (He has made appearances in many others.) He last threw his hat into the ring with the 2002 “Charlie Lawrence,” in which he played a gay actor elected to Congress, pulled by CBS after two episodes; before that was the 1998 “Encore! Encore!,” with Lane as an opera singer sidelined by a throat injury, canceled in its first season with two episodes left to air.
Whether “Mid-Century Modern” is going to be successful is, of course, for time to tell, but the fact that — while very much in the model of a broadcast network show, language notwithstanding — it comes from Hulu means that its 10-episode first season will at least air intact and that, based on some nonscientific, data-free prognostication of my own, the chances of a second are good. It takes an episode to really launch, and there is some tonal distance between the genital and everybody-looks-at-the-cute-guy-walking-by jokes and the expressions of familial sentiment that form the core of the story — sentiments a multicamera comedy in its real-time, shared-space, style-free theatricality is especially adept at conveying. (We are all in it together.) But it’s funny and good-natured; has some excellent guest appearances by Vanessa Bayer, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Richard Kind and Cheri Oteri (as an intoxicated flight attendant); and gives Judd Hirsch (90) to Lavin as a final scene partner — and also grants her a song to sing — in as sweet and well-played an encounter as might be wished. Except for it being final.
