As we bring 2016 to a close, Esquire.com looks back at the films, albums, and television shows that have shaped our year and will have a lasting influence on the culture at large. Read the complete series of essays here.
In May, I flew to Australia for a festival tour. My time in Sydney was glamorous, if you're into books. The festival, which was set on the dramatically beautiful waterfront, was packed, and the weather was crisp and sunny. Melbourne, on the other hand, was more intense: It rained, I had exhausting back-to-back appearances, and people had lots of questions. I gave a speech one night about Donald Trump—then just the recent presumptive Republican nominee—and everyone in the audience laughed and laughed, but I wasn't trying to be funny. The next day I had a conversation with one festival affiliate who said, urgently, "It's extremely important Clinton win because it will send a signal to the rest of the world." Signal sent, I guess.
I never recovered from the jet lag the entire time I was there; after seven appearances in nine days, I was spent. I checked into an enormous, drafty, damp airbnb in the Northcote neighborhood, where I was delighted to learn Netflix worked internationally. I channeled Patti Smith in M Train, specifically the chapter where she locks herself in a hotel room in London, shuts out the city, and consumes British crime procedurals for several days. There is safety in binge-watching. I dragged in a space heater from another room and got under the covers. It was the week Lady Dynamite premiered, and lucky me: it was one of the most inventive and exhilarating comedies of 2016.
Briefly, the show is a loosely autobiographical sitcom about Maria Bamford and her life as a comedian and actress in Los Angeles, surrounded by her bitchy friends, her sycophantic agent, and her two loyal pugs, one of whom talks in the voice of Werner Herzog. She's bi-polar, had a recent breakdown, and is now struggling to recover her sense of self and her career. The show has a complicated structure—we see her in her way past in Los Angeles, when her career is on the rise and she's in the throes of mania; a more recent past in Duluth, Minnesota, where she is recovering from her breakdown; and the present day—her life with her friends and her pugs and lots of terrible dates and acting jobs.
Hijinks are myriad, and weird. She shows up at the wrong audition, and ends up trying out to be a young, black male character on Empire. She trains her dog to competitively herd sheep. She lies on her OK Cupid profile about enjoying outdoor activities and is forced to action-date. "I don't know what I'm doing, more than half of the time," sings Dean Martin at each episode's close.
If Lady Dynamite sounds chockfull of action, it is. Plot points are sometimes not resolved within an episode, but it doesn't affect the pleasure of the story. (The pilot tells us Sugar Ray singer Mark McGrath hates her, but we have to wait all the way until Episode 13 to find out why, making us actually care for the first time in our lives about what happened to Mark McGrath.) The push and pull of the boundaries and the shifting timelines is incredibly clever and makes it all the more fun. Lady Dynamite is wickedly funny and brutally frank and also cotton-candy colored in its aesthetic—bright, and loud, and bold.
I adored the characters, in particular Maria's two best friends, Dagmar (Bridget Everett) and Larissa (Lennon Parham), both of whom hate each other. In many of their scenes together, they sit in a cafe and talk shit about basically everyone and each other. They are bawdy and crass and like to discuss fucking, and they're Maria's support network, for better or worse, even when they're being total bitches. What a relief it is when characters are allowed to be flawed.
I also loved the frank focus on mental illness, self-care, and recovery, with different plotlines dealing with Maria's people-pleasing and boundary issues. One episode Maria learns to accept herself while in the midst of filming a herpes commercial, a brutal-looking fake sore applied to her lip. "Oh my god, she gets better," I thought while I was watching the series. "There's hope for all of us."
After watching Episode Eight, "A Vaginismus Miracle," in which Maria races around town to see if she can find someone to sleep with before her vagina closes up because it's been so long since she's had sex (the realest), it occurred to me my body had collapsed. In fact, I was sick as a dog. Soup, I thought. If I could just have soup.
I dragged my sorry ass down the street through the gloomy weather to an Indionesian restaurant called Yuni's Kitchen. "I'm sick," I told him. I must have looked pathetic: baggy-eyed, pale, and drowned. He steered me towards a big bowl of Laksa, a spicy curry soup, with noodles and cabbage and bean sprouts. I dug into it and I could feel it in my cheeks, and nose, and eyes, and soul. It was one of the greatest fucking bowls of soup I have ever eaten. I asked for a carry-out container for the leftovers, and the man behind the counter, gentle as could be, filled up the container to the top with extra broth, and I thought: I am not alone after all.
Back to Maria: she falls in love with the man she has sex with in a closet on Vaginismus Day, and spends the rest of the season trying to talk herself out of that love. I reheated the soup for the last episode, and ate it in bed, as rain fell all around me in Melbourne. There is a happy ending, a beautiful speech about loving yourself, with pugs as a metaphor for self-acceptance. I did not cry. Rather, I licked my lips, deeply satisfied by the meal Maria Bamford fed me.
If I had checked the news at that exact moment, I would have been disheartened. The rallies, the trolls, the dramatic dissent in all directions. What I know now to be the beginning of the end. Instead I allowed myself to take comfort in someone else's artistic creation, offered to me so graciously. Art and soup and each other: These are some of the things we have in life.
