At 94, Norman Lear doesn’t really need to do anything besides sit back and enjoy his well-earned reputation as TV’s Sitcom King — at one point in the 1970s, Lear was responsible for six of the country’s top ten shows. And yet the creator of All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons is spearheading a remake of his own CBS sitcom One Day at a Time for Netflix, which now has an official trailer.
Lear’s template for socially conscious, family-centric, laugh-out-loud funny network comedies lives on today through shows like ABC’s Black-ish and NBC’s The Carmichael Show. Now, One Day at a Time joins the ranks. The original, which ran from 1975-1984, had a radical enough concept for its time: It was about a single mother (Bonnie Franklin) raising two teenage daughters (Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli).
The Netflix version reimagines the original series with a Cuban-American family at the center. Six Feet Under‘s Justina Machado stars as Penelope, a recently divorced single mom and a military veteran raising a teenage daughter (Isabella Gomez) and younger son (Marcel Ruiz) with the help of her mother, played by EGOT-winner Rita Moreno.
Judging from the trailer, One Day at a Time looks like a fairly conventional, multi-camera sitcom set mostly in the family living room, following in the Lear tradition. But it also looks like it has some bite: In one scene, Machado’s character, apparently a nurse, complains to a doctor that a patient keeps calling her “Maria.” The doctor — played by Stephen Tobolowsky (Silicon Valley, The Goldbergs) — tells her the woman has Alzheimer’s. “Oh no, I’m so sorry,” Penelope replies. “Hey, I’m messing with you,” the doctor says. “She’s just racist.”
One Day at a Time‘s 13-episode first season hits Netflix on Jan. 6.