<em>One Day at a Time</em> Taught Its Fans How to Say Goodbye
One Day at a Time, which was canceled by Netflix on Thursday after three seasons, was always preparing fans for its own ending. It isn’t that the beloved sitcom wanted to end—far from it. Every year, the cast and creatives clawed their way to a renewal, spearheading impassioned Twitter campaigns to save the consistently on-the-bubble show. But on-screen, One Day at a Time understood loss as an inevitability, just as it understood that the sun would rise the next day. The hard fight to survive, and to do so vibrantly, was baked into the DNA of the series itself.
A remake of Normancentered on the Alvarez family, a Cuban American household led by a single mom, Penelope (played by Justina Machado). It was Penelope’s live-in mother, Lydia (a splashy, scene-stealing Rita Moreno), who stared down the specter of death when she suffered a stroke at the end of the penultimate episode of Season 2. The gutting brought her loved ones—Penelope; Penelope’s kids, Elena (Isabella Gómez) and Alex (Marcel Ruiz); and the family friends Leslie (Stephen Tobolowsky) and Schneider (Todd Grinnell)—to her bedside, where they grappled with the awful certainty that one day they would have to say goodbye. “Not yet,” Lydia declared—but eventually.
