A consistently watchable and fascinating peek at the anxieties of assimilated American Jews. Imagine a 1940s movie shot in the style of a shampoo ad, peopled with models, dressed in mail-order catalog furniture and clothes, and tracked with a lot of anxious, booksy verbal exchanges. You'd have this tale of a family of Jewish small businesspeople that marries into Goy-land-- a den of vixens with "foreign" names like TIFFANY and CARLA. LILY's otherness is downplayed throughout the series. This was presumably done to broaden the show's appeal, a detail almost as fascinating than the details of the writing. All the clichés of the Assimilation Genre turn up: the Evil Nordic Boss, the Repressed Wasp Wife, the Funny Jewish Doctor, the Crazy Shiksa, and so on. You can almost tell what the characters are going to say before they open their mouths. But not even Grace shows an iota of curiosity about what lives outside the snug little bubble.
There's even a casting joke: just like the sexy fantasy wives in DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, the sexy Jewish Girls are played by Gentiles-- one of them from Mississippi, no less!
There's even a casting joke: just like the sexy fantasy wives in DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, the sexy Jewish Girls are played by Gentiles-- one of them from Mississippi, no less!