Hello. Welcome to the first newsletter I’ve been threatening to do for some time now where I write about The Nanny. I know some of you might not care much about a network sitcom that existed in the Clinton era, and I totally understand that. Whether or not this little weekly review will live forever over here at The Melt remains to be seen, but even for those that didn’t watch it the first time around or who aren’t watching it now that the show is available on HBO Max, I promise you this won’t be your typical television review type thing, but more of an opportunity to talk about a show that really covers a lot of stuff I already write about here and at other outlets. I promise it will be fun.
I’m calling this Fine Time. I thought about calling it Istanafran, but figured that might be a little much to unpack, so here we are with Fine Time #1 talking about the pilot episode that made its debut on CBS on November 3rd, 1993. What else happened on that date? According to the front page of the Daily News, the big story was celebrities escaping wildfires around Malibu. On page 7, an autopsy revealed cocaine and valium were found in River Phoenix a few days after the young actor died. Ann Landers pleaded “Give kids a break — break up” in her syndicated column. And on page 83, when you had to look in the newspaper to see what was on television that night, while Beverly Hills, 90210 was on over at Fox, a new show described as “Widowed producer hires nanny” had the 8:30 slot after Hearts Afire.
Here’s the thing: I thought about it and I really don’t know if there was another show that had a pilot that is literally described in the show’s theme song. I could break down the entire episode, but it really works out exactly like the song: Fran Fine works in a bridal shop in Flushing Queens. Her boyfriend, Danny, fires her so he can give his new girlfriend, Heather, a job. Right off the bat Fran shows us she’s tough and resourceful. She tells Danny he can’t fire her because she quit, but then walks back into the store and decides that being fired isn’t so bad because now she can collect unemployment. Fran takes a job selling cosmetics door to door, ends up at the Sheffield residence on the Upper East Side, and gets herself a job as a nanny taking care of Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield’s three kids.
Again, you can just go and listen to the theme song and you have a rundown of what the pilot episode is about. What I want to discuss here is the show’s use of Yiddish terms right off the bat because it’s a really big part of the show. Fran is a double outsider: a Jewish girl from an outer borough in a very rich, WASPy home on the Upper East Side. I think we’ve all felt like an outsider before, it’s easy to relate to. Yet Fran doesn’t seem to care about it. She’s not oblivious to it; she embraces it. Not long after meeting Mr. Sheffield, she mentions all the nice tchotchkes in his home, picking up a statue that Maxwell mentions is a Rodin. Today, you can pick up one of his statues if you’ve got five figures or more to blow, and I’m guessing the prices were probably not far off that over a quarter century ago. Maxwell, however, thinks tchotchkes means something else. He seems to think Fran is coming onto him. And while the sexual chemistry and flirting between the two is noticeable from the start, he seems taken aback when he assumes Fran means…his butt…I think? Maxwell, it seems, has never heard this term and freaks out as he tends to do often.
First of all, so what if she was talking about his butt? Second of all, this brings up something more than a few people who watch the show have noticed and mentioned to me: Maxwell Sheffield is a Broadway producer and he seems to have somehow never met a Jewish person before. It’s…astounding. Next you’re going to tell me he doesn’t like gay people or something like that. I mean, does he think the only people that go to his shows are straight white Christian tourists from Ohio? It’s wild and weird and I can’t possibly understand how this is a thing, but, then again, the Upper East Side is a whole other world in many ways, so it’s possible.
But wait! There’s more Yiddish! There’s a joke about not letting a shiksa order food because shiksas don’t know anything about food. Booze, Fran jokes, they know a lot about. But not food. This is another joke you see throughout the show: WASPs like C.C. drink a lot, Fran hardly drinks at all. Sure, Jews drink. We’re not teetotalers or anything, but this review offers me an opportunity to mention one of my favorite facts from a New Yorker article that I read in 2008 and I’ve been quoting ever since: “There is a biochemical basis for Jewish abstinence. Many Jews—fifty per cent, in one estimate—carry a variant gene for alcohol dehydrogenase.” According to the article, Jews and East Asians are more likely to have hangovers than people like C.C. Babcock (Maxwell’s associate who is desperately in love with him), so there’s probably a good reason Fran keeps away from the booze.
Finally, there’s one more instance of Yiddish towards the end of the episode, after Mr. Sheffield acts like an ass and fires Fran, he’s sitting in his office and Niles (the butler) brings him something to eat because Maxwell is looking a bit “peckish.” The sandwich is, as Ms. Fine would say, “a light nosh,” Niles tells his boss. The sandwich and the Yiddish make Maxwell realize what a dick he was, so he goes and apologies to Fran, hires her back, and that is that.
What else do we get in this episode? Maggie, Maxwell’s oldest child, is a shy preteen, but she sort of comes out of her shell and makes out with a young pre-Cyclops James Marsden, who was a server at her father’s party to raise funds for his next play. I mention this as being important because it gives me an opportunity to note that there is a spread at this party and that one thing you see throughout The Nanny is a ton of hors d'oeuvres. If nothing else, these reviews will be used to show that no show has ever given as much love to Yiddish and canapés as The Nanny. Also of note, Gracie (his youngest daughter, who has an obsession with therapy that makes her the most New York member of the Maxwell clan in my opinion) tells her father the dress she wears was 70 percent off from Loehmann's. I’m not going to get that into the whole Loehmann's thing just yet (I’m saving that for another episode), but I will say this is a very New York joke, the type I am fascinated by because, again, this was on the air in 1993. There weren’t that many shows this Jewish or this New York. Sure, Seinfeld, but even though three out of the four main cast members are Jewish in real life, the only character that’s Jewish on the show is Jerry. Even in the early 1990s, being too ethnic for network television seemed to be something executives were shy about. That’s sort of what makes The Nanny so fascinating to me.
That, and as we’ll explore in the coming reviews, it’s not only a really smart show, but Fran Drescher is a comedic genius and the I Love Lucy comparisons the show garnered were really well-deserved.
But we’ll get more into all that during the next Fine Time. Until then, go enjoy a light nosh.