On Media / Pop Culcha

Jewish World Review July 14, 1999/ 1 Av, 5759


Elliot B. Gertel

May 'The Nanny,'
R.I.P. --- not!




HAVING ENDED its first-run episodes, The Nanny has graduated to the rerun stage (in which they've already staked quite a foothold), and the sitcom that claimed a Yiddishe ta'am (a Jewish taste) will have a long afterlife.

Oy Vey!

Not surprisingly, the last episode, about the delivery of Nanny Fran's twins, was the most poorly written and dragged out ever, so overdoing the pregnancy and childbirth pitfalls and jokes that the occasion actually became an ordeal and a labor for the audience!

Yet the writers of that last episode, veterans Caryn Lucas, Frank Lombardi and Peter Marc Jacobson (Drescher's producer husband) remained true to form with the one-liners: Maxwell's first wife never experienced bloating and swollen ankles because she "gave birth to Gentiles." The delivery will be difficult because it's hard to "get a Jewish kid to leave his mother." Fran gets to give birth around her first anniversary, but her grandmother Yetta had to flee Poland on hers, etc., etc., ad nauseam - or at least until the final credits of the final episode, which was well past nauseam.

The Nanny ended blandly and uninspired. It began with the cleverest and funniest first episode of a TV sitcom. And in between there was constant tension, at first a healthy tension between the power of tradition and family and the pull of assimilation and acceptance by the Gentile elite, between pointed satire and tasteless double entendre, between gentle, self-aware humor and cruel slapstick. For the first several episodes of the first season, the writers and cast were able, by and large, to let those tensions work for them, with creativity, humor and what the fine opening song called a "flair."

Econophone But then the creative tensions vanished and an overall and underlying loss of dignity set in. And it was the loss of dignity that reached its peak (or depth) in the final episode.

First, Maxwell's butler and female business partner became receptacles of physical and verbal abuse and, by the final episode, were put through the paces of a humiliating marriage in the labor room and then of an indelicate revelation of their own premature "family way."

Then, Maxwell's children became reduced more and more to props and to slapstick buffoonery. In the last episode, the older two were whisked off and the younger one seemed to be acquiring some nanny duties of her own. The treatment of Grandma Yetta degenerated so badly through the seasons that by the last episode she had become the ninny, working the candy machine at the hospital thinking it was a Las Vegas slot machine, and totally oblivious and perhaps indifferent to the pending birth of her twin great-grandchildren.

During the last season, the one-liners multiplied making Yetta the butt of jokes about social security theft, lesbianism, and interracial dating. (The Hanukkah episode for 1998 had Fran telling Yetta to play with her chocolate dreidl, referring to her black boyfriend from the nursing home, portrayed by Ray Charles).

Jokes about Jewish rituals prevailed but began to level off by the last season. How many Jewish rituals do a general audience recognize enough to get jokes? How many times can we hear about the butler, Niles, making a sausage patty yarmulke for Rosh Hashanah (to take one example from writer Jayne Hamil)? When Yetta's boyfriend, Sammy, asks, "Why is it that Jewish holidays start after sundown?" (the Hanukkah episode), Fran replies, "G-d knew that wearing sequins before five is gauche." Fran takes the menorah lighting seriously, but sees that the Maoz Tzur hymn is replaced by Ray Charles singing "I'll be Home for the Holidays."

The Nanny sunk to the maudlin when it tried to take Jewish rituals seriously, particularly in the last season. Thus, in an episode about Maxwell's former in-laws refusing to accept Fran as the new mom for their uppercrust WASP grandchildren, also by writer Jayne Hamil, Fran tries to win the hearts of all by lighting a yahrtzeit candle for Maxwell's first wife.

She explains that the candle is lit on the deceased's birthday (actual ly, on the anniversary of the death!) in order to "light the way for a happy afterlife." The information is not only misleading, but a wholesale use of Jewish ritual for the self-serving end of being accepted into a Gentile family!

Now Hamil does have Maxwell insist that his parents are "not anti-Semitic. They're best friends with the Rothschilds." So at the very best, Fran is using Jewish rituals to be accepted into the upper crust and not necessarily to assimilate.

Such loss of dignity for every character and on any topic (particularly Judaism) was the unavoidable lot of The Nanny's increasingly uncontrolled over-indulgence in American Jewish "inside" jokes. What we saw here was like an addiction, a "substance abuse" of old one-liners without substance.

And the worst victim of it was the character of Fran's mother, Sylvia who became a portrait of Dorian Gray; her lack of self-control with food and then with sex (!) became a barometer of how much the show had overdosed on "Jewish" jokes about overeating, mothers, doctors, etc.

We never even saw Fran's dad because he was one continuous "Jewish" bathroom joke.

By the end of March, TV Guide announced an episode in which "Sylvia (Renee Taylor) is having an affair with a doctor (Joseph Bologna), which leads to a 'breakup' with Fran and the revelation (for the first time) of the face of Fran's father, Morty (Steve Lawrence)." That episode was, however, yanked out of the announced time, due, according to some media reports, to network concerns about the lack of taste in several of the series's last episodes.

If this is so, how fascinating that TV execs would take a stand against undignified excesses with "Jewish" doctor jokes! Oddly, The Nanny formula proved good for only one thing --- namely, political satire. An episode on a ski weekend spent with Bill and Hillary Clinton, written by Dan and Jay Amernick, utilized the show's double entendres (which were never suited to its time slot and alleged family themes) with far greater skills than one saw even on the old Murphy Brown series.

The final episode minded its p's and q's, but was unable to hide the blatant indignities that resulted from the choice of overdosing on the one-track humor rather than maintaining a creative tension and a sense of Jewish apartness. But Drescher and Company did manage to say their final piece in the last season: What do you want of us? they protested. Our Jews may have no class, but they are warm. Maxwell bonds with his new mother-in-law, Sylvia, when Fran's parents are temporarily rendered homeless by an angry relative (O, how cruel those Jewish relatives on The Nanny can be) because Maxwell's mother left the Baby Maxwell in a garden whenever he cried so that he would stop crying.

In the most recent Hanukkah-Christmas episode, we see how cold Maxwell's father was to him at Christmas dinners, and how warm Fran's mother and (albeit invisible) dad were to her in taking off to the warm climate of Florida with her. That same episode suggested that Maxwell's British sister-in-law showed no emotion when she found out that her boyfriend was hiding the fact that he was a married man, but went into ecstasy when she discovered a vintage brand of liquor while visiting.

The strategy is clear: We may stereotype Jews as a bit declassé, but the Brits are cold and unfeeling. Jews may be a bit crass and materialistic, but they do have warmth and humor. Brits may be dignified and proper, but they are cold boozers. The problem with such "strategy" is that it is the first clause, and not the "but" clause that remains with the viewer.

And that, I fear, is the lasting legacy of The Nanny.


Contributing writer Elliot B. Gertel is JWR's resident media maven.

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©1999 Elliot Gertel