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2024 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

4. Genre Trouble: Netflix’s Lady Dynamite and Self-Help Television

verfasst von : Rodney Taveira

Erschienen in: Adapting Television and Literature

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The focus in this chapter is on Mitchell Hurwitz’s Netflix show, Lady Dynamite (2016–2017)—an audacious and challenging comedy, drawn from the real life of comedian Maria Bamford. In formal terms, the show moves fluidly across time periods, signalled by a number of different visual ‘looks’, with Bamford’s life and work treated as a kind of experimental memoir or scripted stand-up special. Beyond the relentless structural and stylistic zaniness, argues Taveira, lies a sobering and unflinching exploration of mental illness and resilience, presented as ‘Self-Help TV.’ By exploiting the genre of the self-help manual and its adaptation histories, Taveira explores Lady Dynamite’s attempts to both appropriate therapeutic ambition and also subject it to unsparing ridicule. Considering adaptation alongside its source text, Bamford’s stand-up oeuvre, and a history of adapting women’s stand-up for TV, including Roseanne (1988–2018) and Fleabag (2016–2019), Taveira introduces both scripted stand-up and the self-help book as ‘performative infidelities’ (Stam, 2017), literature worthy of study and adaptation that sprouts texts with their own extended, limitless afterlives.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Institutionalising the ‘Bad’ Postfeminist: Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag from Stage to Television

Nächstes Kapitel What Is Television? Two Auteur Series in Literary Contexts

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Stam, “Revisionist Adaptation,” 247.

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I will refer to the character Maria Bamford as Maria and the real-life Maria Bamford as Bamford.

Lady Dynamite, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” directed by Mitchell Hurwitz, written by Pam Brady and Mitchell Hurwitz, aired May 20, 2016, on Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80046194

Lady Dynamite, “Pilot.”

Lady Dynamite, season 2, episode 1, “Wet Racoon,” directed by Ryan McFaul, written by Pam Brady, aired November 10, 2017, on Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80133246

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Lady Dynamite, season 1, episode 9, “No Friend Left Behind,” directed by Ben Berman, written by Theresa Mulligan Rosenthal, aired May 20, 2016, on Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80046402

Lady Dynamite, season 1, episode 12, “Enter the Super Grisham,” directed by Max Winkler, written by Pam Brady, aired May 20, 2016, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80046405

Lady Dynamite, “Pilot.”

Beth Blum, The Self-Help Compulsion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 7.

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Blum, 9.

Blum, 29.

In Season 2, Maria/Bamford explicitly laments, direct-to-camera, what she critiques as discrimination against bisexuals in this episode.

Lady Dynamite, season 1, episode 2, “Bisexual Because of Meth,” directed by Andrew Fleming, written by Theresa Mulligan Rosenthal, aired May 20, 2016, on Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80046195

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Blum, The Self-Help Compulsion, 3.

Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 178.

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See Orlaith Darling, “‘The moment you realise someone wants your body’: Neoliberalism, mindfulness and female embodiment in Fleabag,” Feminist Media Studies 22, no. 1 (2022): 132–147, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1797848, and Jessica Beaumont, “Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag(s): Direct address and narrative control from stage to small screen,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 22, no. 2 (2021): 103–119, https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol22/iss2/10

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Darling, “‘The moment you realise someone wants your body’: Neoliberalism, mindfulness and female embodiment in Fleabag,” 145.

Havas and Sulimma, “Through the Gaps of My Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television,” 1905.

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Fleabag, season 2, episode 2, “The Café’s Thriving Business,” written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, directed by Harry Bradbeer, aired on March 4, 2019, on BBC One.

Tina Fey, “Phoebe Waller-Bridge Interviewed by Tina Fey,” GQ, 10 July 2019, 2.

Wanzo, “Precarious-Girl Comedy,” 85–6.

Fleabag, season 1, episode 6, “The One Who Got Away With It,” written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, directed by Harry Bradbeer, aired on August 25, 2016, on BBC Three.

Tom Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 171.

Wilson, “‘Where did you go?!” Trans-diegetic address and formal innovation in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s television series Fleabag,” 420.

Fleabag, season 2, episode 3, “The Anger,” written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, directed by Harry Bradbeer, aired on March 11, 2019, on BBC One.

Roseanne Barr, “Twitter / @therealroseanne: muslim brotherhood…,” May 39, 2018, https://twitter.com/therealroseanne/status/1001353729872773121

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Rowe, “Roseanne: Unruly Woman as Domestic Goddess,” 44.

Lady Dynamite, “Wet Racoon.”

Fleabag, season 1, episode 1, “The Business Loan Refusal,” written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, directed by Harry Bradbeer, aired on July 21, 2016, on BBC Three.

Roseanne, season 2, episode 8, “Sweet Dreams,” written by Matt Williams, directed by John Pasquin, aired November 7, 1989, on ABC. Viacom Enterprises.

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Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2012), 59, 79.

André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “An Art of Borrowing: The intermedial sources of adaptation,” in The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, eds. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2018), 327.

Gaudreault and Marion, “An Art of Borrowing: The intermedial sources of adaptation,” 327–8.

David Gillota, “Beyond Liveness: Experimentation in the Stand-Up Special,” Studies in American Humor 6, no. 1 (2020): 57, https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerhumor.6.1.0044

“The Special Special Special!” written by Maria Bamford, directed by Jordan Brady, aired on May 30, 2017, on Netflix.

“Old Baby,” written by Maria Bamford, directed by Jessica Yu, aired on May 2, 2017, on Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80133663

Lady Dynamite, “Enter the Super Grisham.”

Titel: Genre Trouble: Netflix’s Lady Dynamite and Self-Help Television
verfasst von: Rodney Taveira
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Adapting Television and Literature
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-50831-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-50832-5

Copyright-Jahr: 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50832-5_4

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