Tune it in ...on PBS Starting at 9:00 p.m. (est) Tonight!
Some Background from NYT:
She’s in Charge Now; No Time to Go Wobbly The sentence you are about to read embeds a horrible cliché I’ve sworn to the gods I’d never utter and denotes a circumstance perhaps historically unprecedented: A five-part Masterpiece Theater mini-series called “The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard,” which begins tomorrow night on PBS, is a guilty pleasure.
It isn’t as though “Masterpiece Theater” hasn’t in the past shown itself capable of operating at the low end of high middlebrow. But “Mrs. Pritchard” makes you feel as if you’ve jumped into a tub of Gummy Bears. It is almost unspeakably fun, and it marks the first time in my lifelong relationship with public television that I’ve ever wanted to hurl a big “You go, girlfriend!” at my set.
Despite its Trollope-ish title, “The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard” is not a costume drama. The series bills itself “West Yorkshire meets ‘West Wing.’ ” But it remains a period piece nevertheless, at least at the level of its soul and ideology. Written and created by Sally Wainwright after her disillusionment over the last British elections, “Mrs. Pritchard” evokes a 1970s pop feminism that doesn’t come around much anymore — a Helen Reddy-“9 to 5”-“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a-bicycle” kind of feminism that feels as distant and goofy to us now as the “Mad Men” era of sexism it fought to depose.
Set in present-day England, “Mrs. Pritchard” is a populist women’s-lib fairy tale, the story of a feisty supermarket manager and matron named Ros Pritchard (Jane Horrocks) who, after seeing two candidates for Parliament get into a mindless pre-election tussle outside her store, decides that she could probably be a better legislator than most of the meatheads out there. Backed by a wealthy female entrepreneur who seems impressed with Ros’s gumption, she decides to run for Parliament as a third-party candidate — the party is called the Purple Democratic Alliance — and she winds up as prime minister, riding high on the sudden and infectious popularity of this new left-of-Labor group.
In its writing and direction, “Mrs. Pritchard” is so resolutely cheerful and straightforward that you really get the sense that Ms. Wainwright is committed to the politics the series presents: What governing bodies of the Western world need is more of a woman’s sensibility and touch. At the same time she takes positions — against the Bush administration, against Tony Blair, against the mishandling of Iraq — from which analogously frothy American television productions tend to recede.
The series gets thornier in the weeks ahead as Ros takes command of 10 Downing Street, forging an alliance with her conservative chancellor, played by Janet McTeer, who is dallying with a young, besotted adviser. That the adviser exists as the only likable male character is part of the show’s fabulism: he’s a 25-year-old driving himself batty trying to secure the attentions of a powerful woman well past 40. Ros’s own husband is a lout who never wanted her to run in the first place, and part of the plot is fueled by questions of his financial improprieties.
“Mrs. Pritchard” is not all candy. There’s some iron, spinach and meat, the suggestion that the obligations of home and family don’t quite deliver the same satisfactions for women as power and work. Ros’s teenage daughter seems merely a drag, posing nude and simply embarrassing her mother.
I must confess that I could watch Ms. Horrocks in anything: if she invited me over to observe her aligning the nib on her fountain pen, I would go. Television has never witnessed a better dingbat than the one she played as Bubble, an assistant, on “Absolutely Fabulous.” Here she sustains such a witheringly funny look of surprise — at the constant reluctance of the press and her minions to accept her unthinkable positions — that we can rest assured there has been no Botox.
“Let’s face it,” Ros says with great assurance during a morning-show interview. “The country has grown out of the monarchy, I’m very fond of the queen both personally and historically, I think her and her family have done very well over the last 1,000 years or so, but what are they for anymore? Really.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/arts/television/20mast.html
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