I loved this series in the 90s. I was in my twenties and found it comforting and amusing. Watching it 30 years later I wonder why I didn't find it disturbing.
The mother's boyfriend hits on the daughter, the daughter's boyfriend hits on the mother and every older man on the show makes mildly to very creepy comments about young women. The daughter clearly has some kind of granddaddy weirdness in that she flirts with her stepfather and dates a series of elderly men.
The Lionel character is so curmudgeonly he's inexplicably rude to nearly all the nice reasonable people with whom he comes in contact. The Jean character, who runs a modestly successful typist temp agency and carries on as though she's running the NHS, is rude and imperious to her staff, discriminatory to her temps and seems to be operating on 80s tech.
The 35-year-old daughter and her friend move into the mother's place and never leave. 8 seasons later both are still boyfriend-less and both working in the same dismal temp agency in which the mother, long past retirement age, still interferes.
Fantastically, both the daughter and her friend are still hopeful of happy marriages and children and the show pretends that this is still possible for these, now, middle-aged women.
The daughter is shrewish and endlessly complaining and, as the series progresses, becomes chubbier and more matronly. Her on/off boyfriend, who is written like a cartoon character, is a playboy with a very successful business. We are expected to believe that he has been pining for this unpleasant, portly lump for ten years. Unlikely.
Add to this a series of silly, poorly written characters who I assume are to pass for English eccentrics. A sister-in-law and her long-suffering idiot husband and a gardener character are all fantastically well written and acted. The rest of the eccentrics are cartoonish and unbelievable. English actors acting as Americans are woefully bad.
There's a bit of a mean streak that runs through the series narrative. Every person with which the couple becomes involved is either an idiot or weird or are something to be mocked. Weirdly, none of the four members of the household seem to have any friends outside of the four.
The mother's boyfriend hits on the daughter, the daughter's boyfriend hits on the mother and every older man on the show makes mildly to very creepy comments about young women. The daughter clearly has some kind of granddaddy weirdness in that she flirts with her stepfather and dates a series of elderly men.
The Lionel character is so curmudgeonly he's inexplicably rude to nearly all the nice reasonable people with whom he comes in contact. The Jean character, who runs a modestly successful typist temp agency and carries on as though she's running the NHS, is rude and imperious to her staff, discriminatory to her temps and seems to be operating on 80s tech.
The 35-year-old daughter and her friend move into the mother's place and never leave. 8 seasons later both are still boyfriend-less and both working in the same dismal temp agency in which the mother, long past retirement age, still interferes.
Fantastically, both the daughter and her friend are still hopeful of happy marriages and children and the show pretends that this is still possible for these, now, middle-aged women.
The daughter is shrewish and endlessly complaining and, as the series progresses, becomes chubbier and more matronly. Her on/off boyfriend, who is written like a cartoon character, is a playboy with a very successful business. We are expected to believe that he has been pining for this unpleasant, portly lump for ten years. Unlikely.
Add to this a series of silly, poorly written characters who I assume are to pass for English eccentrics. A sister-in-law and her long-suffering idiot husband and a gardener character are all fantastically well written and acted. The rest of the eccentrics are cartoonish and unbelievable. English actors acting as Americans are woefully bad.
There's a bit of a mean streak that runs through the series narrative. Every person with which the couple becomes involved is either an idiot or weird or are something to be mocked. Weirdly, none of the four members of the household seem to have any friends outside of the four.