Netflix has renewed Mike Royce and Gloria Calderon Kellett’s remake of Norman Lear’s One Day at a Time for a second season, with all of its core cast-members set to return. The cast was also enlisted to announce the renewal on social media:
The series, which is executive produced by Lear, centers on Justina Machado‘s character, Penelope Alvarez, a Cuban American nurse, Iraq war Veteran, and single mother who’s raising her teenage children with the help of her own mother, played with a mix of hammy brilliance and poignancy by Rita Moreno. The series also stars Isabella Gomez and Marcel Ruiz as Penelope’s kids, Todd Grinnell as their neighbor/honorary family member Schneider, and Stephen Tobolowsky as Penelope’s boss.
One Day at a Time creeps up on you: with its slyly anachronistic multi-cam style, it first distances you from what you’ve come to know as indicators of edgy, contemporary, “truthful” film-like TV comedy. It therefore takes a minute to return to the type of TV viewing — guided by laugh track — you may have been used to in a past life. But as soon as you do, One Day at a Time subverts multi-cam norms, too, as each episode begins to seem like a one-act play in its emotional scope, lack of commercial interruption, and fearlessness in going to dark places otherwise off limits to comedies that look like this (barring, of course, Norman Lear’s own comedies). Each episode digs into issues of cultural and sexual identity, gender, class, and age with remarkable nuance for something broken into 25 minute segments, reinvigorating a form that so often feels comfortable rather for its lazy broadness.