“Miranda.” Why did I click? New on BritBox. Sitcom from 2009. Starring someone I knew from something else (Miranda Hart was on “Call the Midwife.”) It is. So bad. It’s like if a sitcom existed purely to confirm fears of pre-Awareness comedy, but there’s a sort of complicated reason why it’s so unpleasant.
The show centers on a Liz Lemon-esque (I googled; “30 Rock” was 2006) protagonist, a dorky 30-something (?) single woman who likes a laugh but can’t flirt. Or a Hannah Horvath (“Girls,” 2012) foreshadowing: an extremely privileged but plain woman, confident enough not to apologize for taking up literal or symbolic space. I was game for this, maybe? But, bad. So bad.
Miranda’s meant to be a sympathetic good girl, pure naive innocence. A painful joke (the show is apparently “cringe comedy”) hinges on her not knowing what a penis looks like (as in, in general, not a specific one). Gee golly. Which is things like her charming awkwardness manifesting itself in speaking in “an Indian accent” are… how to even convey this? It’s not that she’s problematic (“she” the protagonist, or the creator, this being an autofiction of sorts) but that she’s meant to be endearing. Aw shucks, a pratfall.
The first episode (I think the second autoplayed a bit, and that’s as far as I got) is about how she’s very tall and gets mistaken for a man. Someone calls her “sir” and she’s furious. The misgendering gag is that she goes to a clothes shop with very large sizes… that turns out to be a store for transvestites. (Not trans women, not drag queens; I don’t think such distinctions exist at any rate in the show’s universe.) She buys an outfit for a date in order to look more feminine; a flamboyantly gay man sees her and tells her she passes, which, well. She’s outlandish in sequins and false eyelashes and doesn’t realize what she looks like until a friend points this out.
Pre-Awareness gender-bending humor can be all over the place. There’s Les/Leslie on “Benidorm,” introduced as the butt of a joke, but evolved into an if anything cringe-inducingly heartwarming character. There’s of course Mr. Humphries, who’s gay/bi/drag/trans/everything because, again, lack of differentiation slash categories themselves aren’t stable. And Monty Python, whose cross-dressing I should probably find offensive but don’t. (Terry Jones then Eric Idle in the beginning of “The Meaning of Life,” as Catholic and Protestant, respectively. I mean.) But drag itself has more in common with blackface than is comfortable to acknowledge, insofar as mockery of the imitated is built into the exercise. But, but.
Is it that it would be the worst thing in the world for Miranda if she really were a passing trans woman, and not a tall cis woman? Again, it is not exactly that; it’s more that the show expects the audience to be entirely on her side on this, and to be that way because she’s just so pure.
It’s like you watch “Miranda” and need to re-binge “Inside No. 9” as an antidote.
Ha, it is bad. I’ve used it as background comfort television sometimes, but I can no longer stand it even for that. Her friends are abusive and not funny, her stupidity isn’t believable, and her self-hatred is regressive. She’s choosing it. Plenty of large women outside the box of traditional attractiveness are perfectly confident and have no more problem than anyone else finding sex and relationships with desirable men. Miranda Hart once actually said as much, and said something about how she realized it was the walls she had up rather than her looks that kept her from being “datable” in college. It's too bad she didn't use that realization to make a show that was a much more interesting (and empowering!) exploration of life outside conventional attractiveness.
I do, however, enjoy the episode in which she and her mother visit the shrink. I think it’s called “Just Act Normal”.
EDIT: Oops. Thought I hadn't managed to post, so took the opportunity to do a stealth edit and discovered I was only posting a second time. First one deleted.