One Mississippi, the new semi-autobiographical comedy series starring Tig Notaro and available on Amazon, does not focus on her sexual orientation. And if you believe the stand-up comic and the executive producers, that topic is never discussed.
One Mississippi follows Tig as she leaves Los Angeles after her mother’s tragic death and moves back to her homeland in Mississippi. Tig’s investigation of family, childhood, and life after loss evolves from her initial mission of settling her mother’s affairs into something far more surprising and moving.
The comedy comes from FX Productions and C.K.’s studio-based Pig Newton label, and its executive producers include Notaro, Kate Robin, M. Blair Breard, Louis C.K., Diablo Cody, and Dave Becky.
At Sunday’s TCA summer press tour visit for her programme, Notaro told reporters, “I think the roof is crumbling — or whatever is above us, but it’s definitely a very sluggish process.” This show is the most recent on television to have a protagonist who is out homosexual.
Nearly twenty years have passed since Ellen DeGeneres’ public coming out on ABC’s Ellen, which began with both the actress and the character in the closet, and her subsequent openly homosexual role on CBS’s The Ellen Show, which was cancelled after just one season.
For Notaro, “the option of being homosexual and coming out and conflict of the family would be an easy route to go” because of the show’s setting in Mississippi. That’s not a problem in my life, which is fortunate.
Having a life where no one bats an eye when I say “I have three girlfriends” is a refreshing change from the norm. Creator and leader of Amazon’s humour department Joe Lewis said that the idea of centring the programme on Notaro’s sexuality “wasn’t even a conversation” when the studio first heard the concept for the show.
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It Wasn’t ‘Gay-Themed,'” Notaro Said, “I Didn’t Even Think About It when I Was Pitching It.”
This performance is the second time Notaro and C.K. have collaborated; in 2012, C.K. utilised his website to produce a stand-up special in which she talked about her mother’s death, her own cancer diagnosis, and her treatment for the disease.
After the success of her tearjerker special, which was made available on iTunes, Notaro concluded a statewide stand-up tour in January. She has landed a documentary on Showtime, one on HBO for comedy, and one on Netflix.
Notaro says that the film One Mississippi is “approximately 85 per cent true and there were a few portions when we linked moments together.” We jammed all that into the pilot so we could continue from there if it went to series, but the timeframe is off from when my life truly fell apart.
It’s more imaginary now that I’m writing a series, but there’s still a lot of truth and true incidents from my life woven in. When a reviewer asked Notaro to elaborate on what she meant by “her life breaking apart,” she used her signature dry wit to go off a laundry list of hardships she’s faced since 2012.
I lost my mother, was diagnosed with cancer, suffered from an intestinal ailment that left me unable to eat, and went through a painful breakup and a bout of pneumonia. You get the idea. All of the stuff is in the pilot, and it overlaps rather than being spread out across the four months it took place.
She said the programme is more emotional and realistic, yet it still manages to find comedy in the “real moments.” Notaro said, “There’s nothing I attempted to push any comedy into.”
“It would be more difficult to take things so seriously; it would be more difficult to exclude humour altogether and proceed in a strictly tragic and sorrowful fashion,” I once said.
Both have been very busy with their own projects over the past few years. Tig’s latest movie, Army of the Dead, comes out in May. According to her IMDB, she will also be in the TV movie Other Plans and the biopic Am I Ok? Stephanie, on the other hand, just finished her role as Nat on The L Word: Generation Q and now plays Kris on the show Indebted.
When Tig thinks back on the time she met Stephanie all those years ago, it’s clear that she’s glad they crossed paths. She told The Guardian that she didn’t understand how important marriage was until she met Stephanie. “I didn’t know how not to be with her,” she said.
“Part of the reason is that everything I’ve been through has made me more open to being with someone,” she said. “But really, Stephanie deserves most of the credit because she is an amazing person.”
