Gloria Calderón Kellett On One Day At A Time: “We Made The Show Of My Dreams”
The 2017 remake of One Day At A Time centered around a Cuban-American family dealing with everything from immigration to sexuality to mental illness over the course of its four seasons on Netflix and Pop TV. Showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett joined me on the Pop Culture Planet podcast to discuss the groundbreaking response to the show, saying, “It’s changed my life.”
Calderón Kellett infused a lot of her own family into One Day At A Time. “People have been wanting me to write my family for a really long time. I had heard word from other Latinos who were like, ‘Listen, you get that you get to spend that card once, so you want to be very careful when you do it because it's hard, it's so personal.’ So I really held off for a very long time. It’s really mental when I think about it because I was in a moment where I felt very ready. I was like now it’s time, I’m ready to write my family. I would like it to be a multi-cap sitcom because that's what I grew up on and loved,” she said. “I'm not kidding you that week, that week, I got a phone call [from] Norman [Lear] so it's almost as if I needed to announce it to my ancestors so they could make it happen. It felt that sort of serendipitous.”
She shared that when she met with the team, they were eager to move forward with her plans and treat her as an equal in the process. “When I sat down with Norman, he was so disarming and listened and was very eager to take on everything that I wanted to take on. We were just very in line,” Calderón Kellett shared. “And then Mike Royce, who was already a part of the project, he and I sat down and immediately the first words out of his mouth were, ‘We're partners. We're 50-50 partners. You're not here as the vanity card. You're here because we are going to do this together and I'm going to teach you how to do this job and you're going to be able to do it for the rest of your life.’ And then he stood by those words.”
Working on both One Day At A Time and her upcoming Amazon series With Love were such joyful experiences for her. “I was really fortunate to have such incredible allies lift me up and and listen to me and we got to make the show of my dreams. I loved every moment and I was so present. A lot of times we’re in this industry [and] we are just so crazy with all of the stuff that's happening,” she opened up. “I was so present for every moment of that and every moment of With Love. I was so there and so those memories are are just going to nourish me forever. They added time to my life for sure.”
Gloria Calderón Kellett opens up about With Love and more in our episode of the Pop Culture Planet podcast, above.
