Image courtesy Warner Bros Television
The best TV show you probably never heard of was “prestige” before that term was a word commonly, or maybe ever, applied to that genre. A one camera comedy without a laugh track that started on network TV and migrated to cable, it softened and sweetened my experience of the Bush Sr. era (like its quintessential treat, gise). It starred Blair Brown and its cast included a young Nathan Lane, Victor Garber, David Strathairn and Richard Lawson before he became Beyonce's stepfather. We won’t be streaming The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, because it is locked in a vault due to a lack of music rights allowing subsequent off-network broadcast, and while I am sad for you, if you missed it, I am sadder still for me because, unlike you, I know what I am missing.
The title of every episode started with "Here's..." followed by a cryptic phrase related to some iconography and/or theme in the script.
Like an offering, an explanation, a toast, a blessing, a bit of advice, or a curse. Things I needed then and need now.
So, using real episode titles: "Here's a Bunch of Photos from an Old Album"
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"Here's a Clever Yet Practical Gift Idea"
A few people had the foresight to tape the show and transfer it to DVD—and if you are one of those people, let’s be friends and please invite me to a viewing party ASAP— ironic, because while the show and its protagonist were definitely ahead of their time, practical foresight was very un-Molly-like. I had a full set of tapes, but they were just to tide me over; I really thought there’d be re-runs! They may be crumbling in my closet under a ginormous pile of clothes or they may have been damaged in a storage room flood in the basement of my building, I am not really sure, but I definitely don’t have a video-cassette recorder anymore and I’d feel horrible if it didn’t also just make me feel even more like Molly. Molly was improvisational, and the show was like a play, and you don’t tape plays.
"Here's Why Henry David Thoreau Chose the Pond"
My (then) father-in-law was noisily puzzled by my (then) husband's and my cult-like, cozy devotion to this TV program, saying it was "a show for single women" meaning because it was about a single woman. I think we were both drawn to Molly’s unassuming introversion. She was no 1990s equivalent of an Instagram influencer, not even as much as her 70s predecessors Marlo Thomas or Mary Tyler Moore or her many descendants from Caroline in the City to Sex and the City. In articles about the show, many women and quite a few men said they identified with Molly and her rich inner life. I read somewhere that someone said of its creator, Jay Tarses, that Molly was not only his creation, but actually based on him, like his anima, (and he played a minor recurring character, a benevolent stalker who, over the course of the series moved up the NYC government ranks from garbage man to sanitation exec). But in my own subjective experience, she might as well have been based on me, or people like me, or us based on her …
"Here's Talkin’ to Yourself"
Molly was moody and dreamy, had career issues and artistic aspirations, and was short and wide of hip, which made her, for me, more like a mirror. Like me, she was a bit defiant about just letting life unfurl. Wikipedia all but accuses her of excessive charm and warmth, but it was more like a vulnerable openness which, juxtaposed against her mild misanthropy, still so rarely depicted in otherwise appealing female protagonists, created a continually tottering equilibrium. She was a type, a trope, but never a cliche. In the MBTI she was, like me, an INFP, in the Enneagram, like me, a 4, the “artist.” Years before (the far more conventionally successful and modelesque) Ally McBeal and decades before “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (protagonists of both shows had the anti-Molly career of lawyers), Molly was prone to reveries that would launch her into fully costumed torch songs, mostly, in her case, jazz standards. (Hence the music rights issue.)
Molly got her first poem published in a literary magazine around the time I got my first rejection. She was enmeshed with her mother, whose narration opened each episode; my mother had died just before the show began and I longed to watch it with her. Molly lost her beloved father, and talked to his ghost. She had a brother who, like my father, was an admirer to the point of identification or what we’d now call cultural appropriation, of all things Native.
“Here comes that cold wind off the river.”
I was nervous the show wouldn’t last. I always preferred the rare, the off-beat, cathecting with and mourning the inevitable discontinuation of the rarified things I loved, some might say disproportionately, things I took for granted: products like that cranberry lip balm, that color-enhancing hair mousse, those tiny Chagall notebooks, those cherry cupcakes…I now know this is called an adjustment disorder, which, while not a mental illness per se, is certainly not a sign of mental wellness. My (then) husband used to chuckle about my quirky taste saying, “I hope that doesn’t mean I will get discontinued.” But, no joke, given my dependence on the trivial imagine how I much more I missed Chicagoland, from whence we had recently moved, and my mother who had died just two years prior when I was 26. I needed my comforts, large and small.
And sure enough, the show was canceled by NBC …but then picked up by Lifetime, a move that was, for its time, a reprieve so revolutionary it felt nothing short of miraculous. I wish I could say the same for everything else in my life.
“Here are a Few Things That Can Possibly go Wrong”
My husband and I had eloped during Reading Week, just before final exams our junior year in college when I was 20, he 19, and I remained intensely in love and more than a little (co)-dependent. I was not, to my in-laws bafflement, pregnant, we were in fact engaged for several months prior to our elopement. We graduated on schedule and moved to the western suburbs of Chicago. My then husband had a lucrative career for which he was well-suited, we moved downstate so he could work and earn another advanced degree. Later it occurred to me he had waited, probably unconsciously, until my terminally ill mother had died to further disrupt my hothouse environment. I did not want to go, but we bought a 3000 square foot townhouse, new construction, and my job reluctantly allowed me to relocate and open an office. Maybe it’d all be OK. But I found the community insular, and it was hard to make headway in my career or develop a support system. I had him, a nice place to live, our three cats… and Molly.
Then we went on vacation and our pipes froze and burst. Then he ran into job difficulties, and seemed to be in a continual state of meltdown. Then my employer went bankrupt and when I tried starting a small business to fill the niche my employer left, it took up energy I had no way to replace.
There was a lot of back and forth, off and on in our relationship, so much I lost count, all the while wishing that my marriage, like the show, would somehow be picked up by cable, rescued like our shelter cats; restored, like a discarded piece of furniture plucked from a dumpster, no worse for wear, enhanced even, with, character, a coming of age, a loss of innocence, a patina buffed with the panache of street cred.
But it landed on the forth and off.
"Here's Why a Torch is too Heavy to Carry in a Purse."
At least the first couple seasons Molly remained in love with her ex- husband, a rakish, immature, wildly confident sax-player/band frontman, always on the brink of great success. The attraction between them remained mutual and obvious, but Molly knew better than to regress. While Molly’s break up was never explained in the show, even now I feel like I understand it better than I do my own.
The turning point in our back and forth came when I shocked my ex by announcing I would move back to Chicago. He had not counted on that, perhaps expecting to be able to count on my more proximate adoration and was also worried about the expense and whether I could afford it. It was tricky because he purportedly just wanted me not to be his problem, anymore, but the real problem was of course, that he was thoroughly convinced that my problems were his… and no one and nothing could change that except him.
“Here’s Why You Can Never Have Enough Petty Cash”
I moved to downtown Chicago, Streeterville to Molly’s Manhattan, and became the Midwestern version of the divorced lady in the big city, juggling multiple odd jobs, dating, trusting my muse, confiding in my doorman. And just like Molly, everyone worried about me, which was frustrating, when what all I wanted was to embrace my independence and the stimulation of city life, defiantly letting life unfurl.
"Here's an Expensive Item with No Returns, Refunds or Exchanges"
Molly freaked out when her rent-controlled apartment went co-op and she had to buy it, (years before the same fate befell Molly’s fellow Manhattanite Carrie Bradshaw). I have since bought two condos. Real estate is the ultimate adulting, the choice of roots over free-spiritedness.
"Here's When Life Begins At"
Just before her 40th birthday, Molly falls for an extroverted police lieutenant, and becomes pregnant (before Murphy Brown) out of wedlock, and when her fiance’s shellfish allergy does him in, (he’s wearing a white suit, shimmering in hazy light), she’s left alone with a mixed race baby to raise. I too, at 39, fell for an extrovert of a different race, but some details have been changed; we have no children and I thank the universe every day that he is and we are, not yet discontinued.
But, just like Molly I did end up in HR, for a bit, often firing people I liked.
“Here’s Something I Forgot to Mention.”
I saw Blair Brown in a play at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago a couple years ago. Her birthday is fourteen years and just one day before mine. She said in a 2017 Deadline interview with Jeremy Gerard that she had hoped Molly Dodd residuals would keep her in the money for retirement, but such was not to be; and while she had just been speaking of Molly’s own resonant failure to plan, she made no explicit connection about that of the show and its current consequences. But, like my misplaced VHS videotapes, I thought it was fitting.
"Here's a Neat Way to Tie up the Loose Ends"
For Molly’s part, in the last frame of the last episode she is in a bodega and bumps into an old flame she had just been thinking of …leaving hope for romance and companionship.
For me, the hope could be for a re-boot: Molly would be 70, now, perhaps widowed, perhaps a famous author, perhaps a retired HR executive, (and her bi-racial daughter would be thirty, now, perhaps replete with moody Millennial malaise; perhaps very different from or similar to her mother or both in various ways). Molly could once again instruct me in how I might yet live out some future parts of my life.
If it doesn’t happen, I will just have to dream it. Also fitting, and, best of all, within my reach.
A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers, Julie Benesh is recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant and her writing has appeared in Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, Tin House Magazine (print), Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Gulf Stream, Hobart, New World Writing, Cleaver, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and many other places. Read more at juliebenesh.com.