Playing House's Maggie's Got A Heart As Big As Her Belly

For those of us lucky and wise enough to have watched the tragically short run of Best Friends Forever, it's impossible to watch Playing House and not compare and contrast. The premise is sort of the same, with the characters flipped: while BFF was catalyzed by Jessica (co-creator Jessica St. Clair) getting blindsided by the end of her marriage, in Playing House the jilted one is Maggie, played by the show's other co-creator, Lennon Parham. But even if the performers traded stories, they didn't switch personalities: in both shows, St. Clair plays the one who's generally a manic wacko, while Parham's mostly her steady rock. And while the latter role might seem dull on the page, it's a tribute not just to Parham's performance but to the show's careful characterization that Maggie gets to be funny while still being sane.

Given the lurid circumstances surrounding Maggie's divorce (to wit: her husband's online cheating with a woman who makes her living putting Pringles cans up her butt), the show could have gone in any number of clichéd directions with Maggie's character. She could have gone on some kind of vendetta against Bruce to try to ruin his life; instead, the show let Bruce ruin his life all on his own. She could have gone on a sexual revenge-rampage ("But she starts the series enormously pregnant!" Hey, she's still a lovely woman and there are lots of fetishists who would be into that); instead, she has, so far, just had two very chaste crushes in keeping with her still being emotionally fragile due to the divorce. These showrunners don't just know their characters well; they're keeping them in a realistic world where people act like people. Turning Maggie into Jenna Maroney wouldn't play in Pinebrook.

What the show has done particularly well, in fact, is developed said Pinebrook as a quirky, Stars Hollow-esque setting, and established Maggie's place in it. Even as we've gradually learned the reasons Emma decided to leave -- fleeing both Mark's surprise marriage proposal and her prickly mother -- it's also becoming increasingly clear why Maggie stayed. This is a woman who's apparently beloved by everyone -- not just her sweet weirdo of a brother and the ex-mother-in-law who took her side over her shitty son's, but also the pub waitress who's tickled by her Bosephus costume and her best friend's estranged mom. And Parham is so good in the role that it never feels like Maggie's being idealized: the matter-of-fact way she and Mark discuss the contents of his chief's goiter in this week's episode lets us know this is just the latest of many such conversations they've had, and that while Maggie is clearly a very good person, she's also got hidden depths of perversity that are exactly what we all want in a friend.

If Maggie didn't have such close ties with, apparently, everyone in town, her and Emma's male-stripper revue fundraiser idea clearly never would have worked if she wasn't pretty sure the community would embrace it. Seeing her enthusiastically take on the role of choreographer reminds us of something else, too:

If you leave aside the fact that this is all extremely sexual, it's very supportive. (See also: her advice that her newbie strippers journal about what dance means to them and also shave their balls.) Her advice to Danny about embracing the dance even if he feels graceless and ungainly shows her natural propensity to be nurturing: she will be a great mom! And if her daughter chooses to be an exotic dancer, so much the better!

The main conflict of the episode (other than Mark's objection to the show, which he ends up retracting anyway) arises when Emma gets so blinded by her experience planning fancy events that she misapprehends what this performance is actually about: Pinebrookians seeing their loved ones taking their clothes off and goofing around, not an actually polished routine. That Maggie understands this instinctively is just one of the qualities that makes her so lovable.