Fine Time #2: "Smoke Gets in Your Lies"

A perfect Mother's Day episode of The Nanny

Hello again! Welcome to another installment of Fine Time. We’re on the second episode of the show, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and the timing could not be better because today — as I’m sure you can tell by all the pictures of moms looking hot in your Instagram feed — is Mother’s Day. And while, yes, The Nanny is a show about a young Jewish woman who was working in a bridal shop in Flushing, Queens… it’s also a show about mothers, quite possibly more than any show I can honestly think of. besides maybe Gilmore Girls. Sure, there are lots of incredible television moms from June Cleaver to Clair Huxtable, Carmella Soprano and Lucille Bluth, but The Nanny is a show dominated by mothers. Let’s take stock:

1. Fran and the Sheffield kids. She’s never been a mom, but she’s incredibly warm and loving, the bond she has with the trio is noticeable right away.

2. So Sara Sheffield isn’t exactly Fruma Sarah from Fiddler on the Roof, but her presence is noticeable two episodes in. Maxwell is obviously screwed up from his wife’s passing, and his kids seem, well, pretty well-adjusted given they don’t have a mom and their dad doesn’t seem to offer much guidance. But in the pilotepisode, there’s a moment where Maggie walks down the stairs and Maxwell remarks how much his oldest daughter looks like her mother, and it’s an interesting window into things.

3. Finally, Fran’s mom Sylvia and Sylvia’s mom who we meet in episode 2, Yetta. The misadventures of the three generations of Rosenberg-Fine women could be a show in itself. Some people might find the characterizations offensive, like Judith Peiss did in a May 2nd, 1994 article in the L.A. Times, “Why Won’t TV Let Jews Intermarry?” She wrote:

   The Nanny is the most offensive example. I fully expect that Fran will start wearing plastic slip covers over her clothes. The character has many “Fine” qualities, but the writers choose to portray her in the most negative ways. Why can’t she be Jewish without these offensive stereotypes? I fully realize that this is a comedy, but these characterizations are not funny; they are degrading.

   Lame, right? Well, Fran decided to write a rebuttal to that:

   The truth of the matter is I created Fran Fine based very closely upon my mother, myself and all the wonderful and rich characters I grew up around in Flushing, Queens. I am sorry and sad if the way we really are (yes, plastic covers and all) offends Peiss, mainly because all her article accomplished was to reveal her own insecurities as a Jewish woman living in a WASP culture.

   Pretty good mic drop, Fran. But unfortunately the show still had to contend with people saying it portrayed negative stereotypes of Jewish people, especially women, throughout its run. I find that odd, especially today, when a show like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel really turns up the neurotic Jew thing up to 11 and none of the people who play members of the Maisel family are actually Jewish IRL, and the show is acclaimed to heaven and back. If anything is offensive to me, it’s that sort of thing. I feel like if you’re going to have a show about very Jewy Jews, then at the very least, your main character should be played by a Jewish person. I know it’s hard to believe that somebody named Rachel Brosnahan who grew up in Highland Park, IL. isn’t Jewish, but at least, according to her Wikipedia, we know this nugget:

   

   Anyways, I’m digressing, but also leading to a very important point. And that point is: Yetta!

In the second episode we’re introduced to the icon that is Yetta Rosenberg. It should come as no surprise that in Fran’s 1997 book Enter Whining, she says that Yetta is based off of her real grandmother. Yet unlike Fran and Sylvia Fine, who is played brilliantly by Renée Taylor, the woman who played Yetta, Ann Morgan Guilbert, wasn’t Jewish…and that’s perfectly fine. Like I said, I just want a few of the main characters to actually be Jewish. I don’t really find it that offensive when somebody is playing a Jewish character and they aren’t Jewish, just as long as it isn’t them just being a Yoidle-doidle-dee, you schmuck, give me a deal on this can-tee-lope sort of thing. For instance, Lorraine Bracco as Karen Hill in GoodFellas? She’s perfect. John Turturro has played a number of Jews really well, so has Robert De Niro. But maybe none of them can compare to Ann Morgan Guilbert. She very Jewish as Yetta, but in real life (as far as I can tell), she was not. But the way she plays the role is just incredible. Starting with our first introduction to this iconic character in this episode.

After all that babble, I should say “Smoke Gets in Your Lies” finds us two weeks into the Nanny Fine tenure. She’s made herself really at home in a short period, and that’s sort of telling about the sort of person Fran is. She’s cool. She’ll show up to your house, to your party, to whatever, and she’s instantly comfortable. Don’t you wish you could do that? Maybe you can, but I certainly can’t. Fran, meanwhile, is inviting her friend Val over, she’s kibitzing with Niles the butler and she’s used to a lifestyle. But she’s also trying to get the hang of things, and in what we’ll see is classic Fran style, she tries to give good advice to Brighton, but it backfires and she needs to fix things up.

Well, let me rephrase that: she doesn’t give Brighton advice, but something she says is taken as advice. When he can’t figure out why people don’t like him, Fran tells Brighton of the cool bad-ass in her school who used to smoke cigarettes, and Brighton takes away “I should try smoking! Smoking is cool!” as the way to get people to notice him. He gets busted and tries to get Fran to sign a slip by saying he learned about handwriting analyzing and wants to look at her signature. It’s actually not a bad move, but Fran’s no dummy, and she needs to figure out a way to tell Maxwell what happened.

Long story short, she does, and after a few misguided ideas on how to teach Brighton a lesson, she arrives at the idea to bring him to meet her grandmother in her nursing home. Also, she wears this incredible outfit:

I feel like “Also, she wears this incredible outfit” is going to be a recurring phrase you see here at Fine Time, and maybe I’ll try my best to break them down from time to time, but we’re talking about mothers here so I’m going to get back to Yetta.

I don’t how many of you out there visited nursing homes in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but damn, the feel of Yetta’s is so real. Just a bunch of older folks all hanging out, playing board games, watching television and, in Yetta’s case, smoking and reading a newspaper.

Now I’m not entirely sure what sort of studying for the role Ann Morgan Guilbert did, but lord, she nails the Jewish grandma thing down. The accent, the mannerisms and, of course, the looks. The thing is that when you go back and watch Guilbert in her other most famous role, as Millie Helper on The Dick Van Dyke Show, it’s pretty obvious this was a person who really got into her roles. Besides the whole age thing, Millie and Yetta are a million miles away from each other. And, in a funny little twist that bridges the Jews play Italians well/Italians play Jews well rule, she also plays Sophia Loren old Italian Mama in Grumpier Old Men. So she could nail the Jewish mom/grandma as well as the Italian one. Truly some iconic shit.

The whole nursing home scene is really incredible, as Fran, Maxwell and Brighton show up so Brighton can see what smoking does to you as you get older, but also because there is a great little babka part that beat Seinfeld's “The Dinner Party” episode with the whole “Cinnamon takes a back seat to no babka” line by nearly a year. Maxwell tells Yetta they brought her a babka, and the way Yetta tells him to keep it quiet that they brought her the delicious dessert, because the other older folks at the home will want some. And, as we find out in the last seconds of the show when Maxwell lets it slip what they have and the citizens of the nursing home descend on Maxwell and Fran like zombies looking for brains, well, it’s good stuff.

Jews and mothers. Man, it’s a thing. Everybody knows about it and it’s often presented in a somewhat unflattering manner, and the reason is, well, blame men.

I know, I know. I’m a guy and I’m writing this, but it’s sort of obvious when you look at it, right? Let’s start with Freud coming up with the idea of the Oedipus complex. You can go ahead and find a thousand college papers on his idea of theory of how young boys are sexually attracted to their mother and how it relates to his Jewishness. But let’s skip ahead to America and the 20th century and the first Jewish mother lots of Americans maybe got to know: Gertrude Berg as the iconic Molly Goldberg. A character that spanned radio, stage and television and is warm, loving and the glue that holds her family together, but she was also created and wrote the character and her stories. The Goldbergs TV show ended in 1955 and there was a void for a few years until the 1960s and…men start making Jewish mothers a thing, the source of blame for all their ills. Philip Roth, Woody Allen and a few other guys whose names you type and then yell “Duck!” The whole overbearing thing. The “You should call your poor mother” thing. All those things that even if you aren’t Jewish you’re familiar with because the Jewish mom stereotype has been blown up to the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon.

And then there’s The Nanny, which you can look at as one of two things. The first is from a 2011 article from the Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought on “A History of Jewish Mothers on Television: Decoding the Tenacious Stereotype” by Myrna Hant:

In the figure of Sylvia (played by Renée Taylor), the Jewish mother of Fran in The Nanny, which began airing in 1993, the stereotype of the Jewish mother becomes even more congealed into a caricature, an exaggeration of materialism, consumerism, whininess, and poor taste. Fran is in her 30s working as a nanny for the three children of her employer, unmarried, British producer, Maxwell Sheffield

Ooof.

The other is by Jason Diamond, the guy who writes a Substack newsletter (I also have a few books, but who’s counting). And that is this: Fran Drescher created characters based off the people in her real life. Did she maybe exaggerate things for comic effect? Who cares? You don’t see anybody walking around going “Man, Franz Kafka really made his whole crappy Jewish dad into a thing.” The thing is there are certain truths behind some Jewish stereotypes. I can only speak to the ones I know, of course, but there are definitely reasons Jews portray Jews a certain way, i.e. because some of us do yell to talk, and some of us are obsessed with getting married and some of us do eat when we feel sad, and some of us do like a good bargain. Fran’s characters remind me of people I’ve known and grown up with my entire life, but the thing is it’s a sitcom. The whole purpose of The Nanny is to make people laugh, so she had to use Sylvia and Yetta for certain kinds of jokes. But since this is only episode two, we find as time goes on that Fran actually does a really great job of exploring the Jewish mother and child relationship in a smart, sometimes outlandish, but also sometimes really nuanced way. Yet through it all, it’s her mom’s mom, Yetta, that really steals every scene she’s in. And it all starts here in “Smoke Gets in Your Lies.”