NBC’s new sitcom, “The New Normal,” has generated a season’s worth of publicity and controversy — and it hasn’t aired yet.
Created by out screenwriters Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “Nip/Tuck”) and Allison Adler (“Glee,” “Still Standing”), the sitcom is about a gay couple with successful careers and a committed, loving partnership who want to have a baby. Into their lives comes a young woman, Goldie, a waitress and single mother looking to escape her dead-end life and small-minded grandmother, Jane (Ellen Barkin). Goldie decides to move to L.A. with her 8-year-old daughter and becomes the couple’s surrogate.
Apparently, that was too much for a Mormon church-owned NBC affiliate in Utah, KSL, which announced Aug. 27 that it won’t air the sitcom because it deems the content inappropriate for its audience.
That didn’t sit too well with show star Barkin, who took to Twitter criticizing KSL’s stance, considering that it airs other NBC shows like “Law & Order: SVU,” which frequently has plots involving rape and crimes against children.
Days after her Tweet, Barkin was more interested in talking about the show itself than the controversy with KSL.
“I am in no way speaking for the creators of the show, Ryan Murphy or Ali Adler, but for me personally as an actor, when I read the pilot script, I just thought, Oh, Ryan Murphy with his big beautiful brilliant brain, along with Ali, have come up with a way to reach out to a very divisive country about some very, very important issues. And I guess the big overriding issue is, what makes a family? And they’ve done it with an enormous amount of love, sensitivity and more fun than a barrel of monkeys.”
Barkin also talked about the appeal of the character she plays, who has been described as very outspoken and not politically correct.
“Right off the bat, this is a very un-PC character, but she is whip smart,” Barkin said. “She is extremely well-informed, and extremely articulate. So, this isn’t a stereotypical liberal version of you know what — someone who doesn’t disagree with their positions, whatever they are — anti-choice, antigay, anti-any ethnic, anti-foreigner xenophobic character. She is not that. She’s informed, she’s passionate about her commitments, and they are informed positions. And I would just, like Ryan Murphy did, beg people not to judge this character until they get to know her, because they are going to be very surprised.”
Barkin added that the rest of the characters on the show are sympathetic, not relying on stereotypes.
“I think that all the characters on the show are true and honest, and they’re not stereotyped,” she said. “And the characters, their positions are from the heart and from life experience. Now, some people’s positions are more fear-based than others, and I do reference ‘All in the Family’ — you know I don’t know if anyone ever tops Norman Lear — but I do think that is a good template for what we’re going for. And at the end of the day, I mean you had to stick with him, but at the end of the day, Archie Bunker was a humane person. He was afraid of the ‘other’ and, as you watched the show progress, you saw, you know why he was afraid and he became a very complicated character. And I think all of our characters are very complicated and deep. And, you know I was saying before, like quite frankly we can barely get through a table read without breaking up and laughing. Our writers are brilliant, and the humor is just inherent in who they are.”