Setting aside the question of which city NBC deems weirder than L.A., there’s a problem here. Comedy is all about timing. And there’s nothing funny about the current state of Los Angeles.
Fey’s L.A. is, miraculously, free of covid-19 by this spring, after “Dolly Parton bought everyone the vaccine.” That’s a huge imaginative leap for anyone looking at a county with a death toll nearing 13,000. At present, about one in every five Angelenos checked for covid-19 is testing positive. The county’s covid hospitalizations — just under 8,000 — appear to be leveling off but remain over 1,000 percent above where they were two months ago, according to L.A. County’s Department of Public Health. Dodger Stadium is home to both the defending World Series champions and the nation’s largest covid-testing-site-turned-vaccination-center.
“Mr. Mayor” seems just as clueless about the rest of L.A.’s troubles. In the second episode, for instance, Bremer — high on marijuana — visits a local school. Good luck with that: While pot is widely available, L.A. public schools are closed, their plans to reopen stalled. Getting kids back in classrooms requires facing down United Teachers Los Angeles, perhaps best known for their six-day walkout in 2019 that upended the lives of half a million students, cost the district more than $100 million in state funding and generally achieved nothing. Now, the UTLA is pushing for a laundry list of pet causes that have nothing to do with covid — including demands for Medicare-for-all, a new California wealth tax and defunding the police.
The fictional “Mr. Mayor” also makes passing mention of homelessness. In real life, the county’s homeless population in 2020 increased 12.7 percent from the prior year, and one forecast predicts chronic homelessness could surge by a “catastrophic” 86 percent over the next four years. Angelenos on Skid Row are being ravaged by covid-19, with shelters being converted to triage centers and 2020expected to set records for deaths among the homeless population.
Transportation, the bane of Angelenos’ existence, likewise receives lip service. But it may be one reason the next federal transportation secretary will be Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., rather than — as had been rumored — L.A.’s mayor, Eric Garcetti. Would you entrust America’s crumbling infrastructure to a man whose constituents, before the covid-19 lockdowns, spent the equivalent of four days a year stuck in traffic?
It’s worth noting the subjects that didn’t make the show. Race relations, still fraught after the summer, are almost entirely ignored except for glib jokes — like when the mayor’s political rival demands to know: “Did you post the black square on Instagram? Either way, how dare you?” Also overlooked: jobs and the economy. This is odd, given that the fictional Bremer — a retired gazillionaire — presumably would have run on his private-sector bona fides. Then again, there’s not much comedy to mine here, either. Elon Musk is unloading L.A. properties as he flees California’s disastrous business climate. Disney is reportedly looking to move some of its California-based operations to Florida. And even though film production workers are deemed “essential” — to the chagrin of local restaurateurs who’ve been shut down — Hollywood is at a standstill.
Undergirding all of this is a deeply flawed general conceit. We’re supposed to laugh at a businessman-turned-politician who, because he’s an outsider, doesn’t get how government works and fails to respect its pieties. Yet after four years of watching that reality-TV hook play out in the Oval Office, what norms of political behavior remain unbroken? What plotline would strike audiences as hilariously outré? Viewers of NBC’s news programs are right now seeing where this storyline leads — and no one seems to be chuckling.
If “Mr. Mayor” proves short-lived, there will be many culprits — lame dialogue, bad acting, unoriginal plotlines. But the biggest blunder will be basing a comedic series on life in a city that, these days, is no laughing matter.
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January 15, 2021 at 06:46AM
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NBC’s ‘Mr. Mayor’ treats life in Los Angeles as a joke. The reality is deadly serious. - The Washington Post
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