1x07 Bella

[7.6/10] We once again have a tale of two sides of the equation here. The event is the National Women’s Convention in Houston, and this time the combatants are Phyllis and, as the title might have tipped you off to, Bella Abzug.

I have to say I was excited for Bella to get a spotlight episode, if only because Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale is just so good and because she has plenty of the best one-liners in the show. Her episode was good, but a little disappointing, if only because it felt like this installment covered a lot of thematic ground that had been covered in prior episodes. There’s different angles and situations, but it’s a lot of the same issues the show’s already addressed.

That includes aging out of the movement and seeing other people carry the torch. We saw a good amount of that with Betty Friedan’s episode. It also means decisions over whether to be pragmatic or principled, which we saw in Shirley’s episode and Jill’s episode. Hell, it even tackles LGBT representation being shuffled to the backburner within the movement again. All of these things are good topics that the show did well with previously, but there’s not that much new here despite some different players being the focus and the convention as the point of attack.

Still, what we get is good even if it’s not groundbreaking. I like Bella as the pragmatist of the group, one who is not above self-flattery, but who also feels like she has to focus on what she can get done versus what she believes in. The show complicates that, involving Bella’s ego, her sense of being difficult to work for, and her willingness to throw her friends under the bus if she has to. Those are all great notes for Martindale to play, and there’s a lot at stake given, as Betty describes it, how the world will react if this hastily-put together convention isn’t the success everyone hopes.

At the same time, both she and Phyllis are worrying that the world and the movement has passed them by. Bella confides in Betty over whether they regret not feeling like radicals anymore. Her former assistant is now an assistant to the President. Gloria Steinem, as Betty had to deal with, is a bigger name and force than Bella now. And after a losing Senate race, Bella also wants to use the occasion and Schlafly as a lightning rod to get a little more attention and notoriety again.

What’s interesting is that the same thing is happening to her erstwhile opponent. Phyllis’s allies are shufflign her off to the side after a pie-in-the-face incident revealed how controversial Phyllis’s profile makes her. All of her lieutenants were elected as delegates to go to Houston when she stayed home. She even laments how Bella was able to go to Congress using a slogan that Phyllis herself lost with. And that’s all before the signs of menopause she’s dealing with (which is the only explanation allowed on television for any woman of a certain age being warm). Both Bella and Phyllis are feeling their generation receding and the next wave rising.

What adds insult to injury is that Phyllis feels like she’s losing the war at home. Her eldest son is gay. Another can’t find a direction. Another is going to the den of liberalism in Berkley. And her daughter is embarrassed to be associated with her, changing her name and listening to provocative tunes from The Runaways. For all Phyllis champions the traditional American family, she’s having a hard time with her own family.

There’s a big sense of your kids growing up and talking back to you in this one. That’s plainest with Phyllis’s daughter, who does it literally and causes the emotional stir that prompts Phyllis to miss the local convention. But we see it on both sides of the political divide too. Rosemary claims leadership of an offshoot group. In a great scene, Bella forces Alice and Pamela to realize that given all their organizing, they basically are working girls, something they use to subtly challenge Phyllis’s authority. And Bella herself gets tongue-lashings and challenges from Gloria and Midge, who question her commitment to the cause.

The difference is that Bella bends and Phyllis doubles down. As I said in the last episode, this is a show whose thesis is that sticking to your ideals is the only way to go, so it means for Bella’s change of heart to be a return to her roots. She makes sexual preference an issue for the convention, winning the approval of Midge and her partner, and doing what’s right over what’s convenient. More than that, at Gloria’s behest, she opens the convention to all women, including the “antis” who are working so hard to stop their movement, under the principle that all of these women deserve a voice and that they shouldn’t just be “preaching to the choir.” There is something genuinely heartening about the splitscreen sequence where all these different women from all these different walks of life open up their passes to the convention.

But that’s counterbalanced with Phyllis’s Machiavellian ploy to hang on to her role in the movement and to stop this at all costs. She’s willing to help Lotty stage a “pro-family” counter-rally in Houston and tacitly court the support of the Klan. Despite having been tarred with the accusation that she’s in league with hate groups, Phyllis will come up with a cover that can both ensure their involvement but give them plausible deniability, to tear down the accomplishments of women who are both against her and on her side.

Bella is willing to let others lead the way and let their ideas bloom. Phyllis, as she always has, just wants to hold the line. History can tell us which approach wins the battle and which wins the war.