One Day at a Time: Gloria Calderón Kellett Reveals the Inspiration for Some of the Sitcom’s Most Memorable Storylines [Interview]

With One Day at a Time heading to CBS for its network television debut, more viewers are going to have the chance to fall in love with the Alvarez family. 

The critically acclaimed sitcom, which is inspired by Norman Lear’s 1975 sitcom of the same name, centers on a Cuban-American family in Los Angeles and tackles such issues as mental illness, immigration, sexism, homophobia, and racism.

I recently had the chance to chat with co-creator and co-showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett about the series and some of the real-life inspiration for the stories we see on screen.

She also gave some insight into the decision to bring one character back in Season 4. (If you’ll be watching for the first time on CBS month, please note there are a few spoilers at the end!)

By the way, you can also read the first part of my interview with Gloria Calderón Kellett here, where she discusses the CBS debut and what first-time viewers should know about One Day at a Time.

One of the issues One Day at a Time tackles is mental health and anxiety, and Calderón Kellett shared why she believes that topic is of particular importance, noting the Season 2 episode “Hello, Penelope” in particular.

“We really start with, what are things that people are talking about in their houses? That’s really where the writers’ room becomes so essential. So many of the storylines are from things that are ripped from our lives. I’m somebody who suffers from anxiety, so that episode was exactly what happened when I went off of medication. That was, for me, important especially because communities of color, traditionally, are very resistant to treatments that are not Jesus.” 

“There are things that we need to talk about as a community and I think mental health is an important one, especially right now for women to be alive, and to be doing everything that we’re doing, and balancing and figuring it out,” Calderón Kellett added. “I think that a lot of times the story, specifically of women — we are supposed to be strong without having any cracks in our armor, which is unfair. So certainly somebody like Penelope, who is a veteran and who has been to war and is back and is trying to raise two children, and take care of her mother, and balance her career, and be in love — and it’s a lot.”

Part of the goal in addressing mental health with Penelope is to “honor what her journey was” and explore “the tools her in tool chest,” one of which is therapy.

“All of the things that she does are tools that work for her, and hopefully will encourage people at home to determine what’s the best course of action for them. Not a one size fits all situation,” Calderón Kellett noted.

Many of the show’s other storylines are also inspired by the writers’ own lives. Calderón Kellett offered up a few other examples.

“Mike [Royce’s]’s daughter is a young lesbian, and she inspired many of the storylines we did with Elena. And then our writers’ room is very queer, and we go to our queer writers and say, ‘How can we make this story more authentic? What details can we put in this to make people feel really seen and understood?’ And they fill in so much of that.”

“My mother has a garage full of boxes. So me having to deal with all of the boxes and how she saves everything inspired the Storage Wars episode. All of these things come from real places,” she continued. “My brother had a situation in San Diego where he went to the beach with his sons and somebody told him to go back to Mexico. And he was like, ‘What? First of all, I’m Cuban. And second of all, don’t say that to anybody. What?’ Because he is darker than I am.”

She said those real-life stories become a way to create “a conversation that we’re getting to have with our audience” and try to find “common ground or some tools to get through it.”

“What’s hilarious is we have an episode where, I think it’s the colorism episode, actually, where the guy comes over to the table and says, ‘Can you guys keep it down?’ That happened with Justina [Machado]. Justina and I were at dinner and that happened to us, where people told us that we were being too loud and were throwing some ethnic stuff our way that we did not appreciate. And Justina was not having it,” Calderón Kellett recalled. “She went over to that table and very kindly and with a lot of class, took them down a couple of notches and it was pretty spectacular. So I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to put this in something. This is too good.'” 

“It was fantastic. It was so classy. The thing is, Justina can go zero to ratchet in a second, right?” she laughed. “But in this moment, what I found so hilarious was she surprised me. She became the classy… She was like, ‘Excuse me. I think that it is very rude.’ But she was so proper.”

I mentioned at the beginning of this article that there are spoilers for One Day at a Time Season 4. If you haven’t seen the season yet (or at least the first few episodes of it), you might want to stop reading now and come back later. There’s one storyline from Season 4 that Calderón Kellett and I simply had to discuss.

There’s a beloved character who returns in the show’s fourth season, and I had to know about the decision to bring him back.

That character is Max, played by Ed Quinn, who becomes an important part of the story in Season 4. 

While Penelope and Max’s relationship ended in Season 3 because Max had different hopes for the future when it came to having children, Season 4 brought them back together with an understanding that those differences were resolved. Calderón Kellett gave some insight into the decision to have Max return and have the characters reunite. 

“We love Ed [Quinn]. He’s just very busy,” she said, noting that Ed Quinn is currently starring on Tyler Perry’s The Oval. “We are dear friends, so I talk to him a lot and he just works a lot and he’s a very busy guy. So it was, can we get him? How long can we get him for?”

“Justina is a beast of an actress. She is just power and it’s been a really interesting journey to see who connects with her and who has the ability to hold the stage with her. Her and Rita [Moreno], when the two of them are on a set, back away. That’s just power that you’re seeing, and Ed really embodied Max and really brought to the table a really strong character that was able to play tennis with this woman,” she explained.

“I think Max is a great partner for her and pulls out the soft side, but also likes that she’s independent.”

She explained that when Penelope ended their relationship, it was a choice she felt she had to make because she loved him. Calderón Kellett had seen her own friends in their forties face similar dilemmas. 

“Some go into it and just say, ‘You know what? He said I’m enough and that’s cool.’ And other ones are like, ‘If this is something he wants, I don’t want to stand in his way.’ So I think it was an important conversation for us to have, but what has happened in the interim is the character has gone off to go abroad and do a lot of work, which funnily enough, Ed also does in his own life. He goes to Indonesia and does a lot of work in Indonesia. We found that the character was able to fill that with other things and that at the end of the day, he still really wanted Penelope in his life.”

With Schneider and Avery now having a baby on the way, there was a possibility that a deeper discussion about children could come up again for Penelope and Max, but at the end of the day, the writers decided it wasn’t necessary.

“We wrote a bunch of versions of it and it all felt a bit redundant, so we have a bit of it, but we ended up cutting most of it from that Halloween episode because we felt like we get it, the audience gets it, and we get it, and we see what Max’s life is now and we understand that he’s good.”

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Don’t miss the One Day at a Time network television premiere tonight beginning at 9/8c on CBS!

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