MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)

By: David Smay
March 2, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF MOLLY DODD | 1987–88

The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd presents a curiously encapsulated fantasy of New York City, very specific in its details and walled off from the present by so many seismic historical shifts that it feels as quaint a depiction of NYC as The Thin Man or My Sister Eileen.

In the Venn diagram of cultural artifacts on the cusp of ’80s/’90s Manhattan, Molly Dodd shares the most with the music of the Roches (see their ’89 album Speak), following the sexual misadventures of women a bit too old for post-punk gestures, but too literary, too folky-artsy to be Material Girls.

You can see slimmer slices of overlap with Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancy and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan: a boho-lite world floating on the periphery of publishing, museum dates, bodega flowers and tidy obsessions with Dawn Powell or The Waverly or Sondheim. It was a magical alternative timeline with arts funding that allowed a jazz musician to score a show at the planetarium.

In Molly Dodd, Jay Tarses created the tip of the late Eighties “dramedy” movement (which included such contemporaneous gems as Frank’s Place, and another Tarses show, Buffalo Bill). Though widely seen as a failed experiment at the time, this approach came to define prestige TV in the new millennium, in shows such as Atlanta and Insecure, with Fleabag being the format’s crowning achievement (and a direct descendent of Molly Dodd).

I wouldn’t insist that Patrick Williams’ score for The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd defines the era but I doubt any other theme does more to set the emotional tone for a show. It’s a bluesy jazzy violin melody wrapped in wistful, bittersweet melancholy. Rainy day stuff. Despite jazz violin going back to the ’30s this theme could only have happened in that specific historical moment with its cheesy synth chords and Fender Rhodes. Nonetheless, it is perfect.

Because the producers failed to secure the music rights, Molly Dodd exists in a legal limbo which precludes DVDs or streaming. To further complicate things, after its first two abbreviated seasons aired on NBC, it was dropped from the network, and picked up by Lifetime and became a much less interesting show for three more seasons (though star Blair Brown’s winsome performance was nominated for five Emmys).

Savvy cultural consumers, however, will know that a quick search will turn up a complete run of the episodes. There you’ll find that Molly is the ultimate New York dreamgirl — witty, beautiful, flustered, stylish, tart, warm, and (like Annie Hall) a very capable singer of jazz standards. As such she has no shortage of suitors, and she follows her heart down every wrong turn, starting in the pilot with her philandering boss (Victor Garber), re-entangling herself with her ex-husband (William Converse-Roberts) and most memorably with the diffident, neuro-atypical bookstore owner, Moss (David Straithairn).

In that arc with Molly and Moss, in that unlikely New York where you can pay your rent by working at a used bookstore there is a scene that is so well written, so off-kilter and charming, so digressive and unexpected, so perfectly played by Staithairn and Brown it will make your cynical heart of tar alight with joy. It is by any reasonable standard the most romantic scene in television history.

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MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)

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