The original Norman Lear sitcom One Day at a Time starred Bonnie Franklin as a newly single mother raising two teen-aged daughters in Indianapolis. In 1975, when the show started its nine-season run, that kind of family setup was not the usual thing depicted on television.
Now, more than 40 years after the original debuted, the new Netflix series One Day at a Time still focuses on a single mom raising a couple of kids, but this time the family is Cuban and lives in the LA neighborhood of Echo Park.
The time, the mom is Penelope, a nurse and veteran played by Justina Machado. She lives with a daughter and a son, as well as her mother Lydia, played by Rita Moreno. It's still a comedy, but since this is a Norman Lear show, there are serious topics like depression, feminism, deportation and veterans' issues.
Brent Miller, an executive at Norman Lear's Act III productions, came up with the idea of rebooting One Day at a Time with a Latino cast when he saw a study that Latino women were being under-served on television. Seeking authentic Latina voices to write and produce the show, they hired Gloria Calderón Kellett, who before One Day at a Time, wrote for shows including How I Met Your Mother and iZombie. She wasn't specifically looking to work on a reboot, but then she got a fateful phone call.
Calderón Kellett tells us about first meeting with Lear, where she shared stories about her Cuban family, many of which found their way into the show. She also tells us about past experiences starting out as an actress and being told she wasn't "Latino enough" and then working in writers' rooms where she was the "diversity hire." Now that she's the one in charge of a writers' room, she and the other executive producers strive to make it as diverse as the family they're filming, but she acknowledges, there's still a lot of work to be done.