'Funny Woman' Recap: Season 2 Episode 1

Funny Woman airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW and streaming. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Barbara Parker may have left Blackpool behind and found fame as Sophie Straw in London, but she still holds her home dear. After all, it gave her the character that won her attention and will now be the star of a new show, Just Barbara. So Barbara is excited to throw the switch lighting up the city for Blackpool’s annual Illuminations, an event she loved as a child.

Unfortunately, her relationship with her father and Aunt Marie is strained, given that she now suspects that her father hid her mother’s attempts to contact her after she walked out for another man.

But she still has her friends in London: her roommate, Marge, and friend, Diane. The latter is helping Barbara out for a bit of cash until she finds work, having walked out of her television news gig in protest of racism and subsequently lost a secretarial job after a single day when she refused to sleep with her boss. Both she and Marge are joining a campaign for equal pay for women.

Barbara has a new team for Just Barbara, since Dennis, Bill, and Tony signed a contract with another studio for a show called Battlelines. Neither show is going well. Although Barbara grew up watching shows by her new writers, she now finds their comedy retrograde and infantile – she wants to show modern life and modern women. But when she asks the executive Ted Sargent for her old team, he calls them traitors and simply assures her that her feedback will be taken into account. Meanwhile, her old team is a bad match for the pompous actors assigned to Battlelines, one of whom is an alcoholic boor.

Barbara’s separation from her old team is also unfortunate because of her budding romance with Dennis. He and his wife Edith are getting divorced because Edith has been cheating on him. But Dennis and Barbara can’t be together until the divorce is finalized, lest the press pounce on the scandalous story. Nevertheless, a casual meeting between Dennis, Bill, and Tony and Barbara, Marge, and Diane is engineered at a pub – with photographers in hot pursuit, of course. Marge starts her own romance there when she meets the kind Roger.

The divorce proceedings are less straightforward than everyone would like, however. Edith doesn’t want to have it pinned on her for adultery, because that would ruin her career and life. But Dennis doesn’t want to start a relationship with Barbara to provide grounds for the divorce via adultery because it would ruin Barbara’s career. And adultery is one of the only legal grounds for divorce.

Edith wants to start a family with her lover, so she decides to engage her own independent lawyer.

That’s not the only setback for Dennis. The dress rehearsal for his show Battlelines is immediately derailed when Bill mutters complaints about the lead actor, who eventually tries to take a swing at Bill and falls off the stage. Dennis suspects the show will never make it to air.

Barbara’s show gets on-air, but doesn’t do much better. Diane and Marge are scheduled to join a sit-in protest but reluctantly stay home with Barbara to watch the premiere of Just Barbara. But Barbara quickly tells them to go to the sit-in when she realizes how much she dislikes the show. Her father and aunt also seem lukewarm on it, and when Aunt Marie calls Barbara afterward, she tries to ask Barbara not to blame them for keeping her from her mother but Barbara hangs up. Her father, with whom she was once close, has barely spoken to Barbara.

Reviews for Just Barbara and Barbara’s performance are bad. Dennis calls her from a phone booth and she speaks to him from her bed, which she hasn’t left all morning. They both blame themselves for their current unfortunate work situations.

To pull Barbara out of her funk – and to cede the apartment to Marge and Roger – Diane brings Barbara to a bohemian party hosted by a Lady Pandora, or Pandy. There she meets Lynda Jay, a fan of hers who suggests that they meet up later to talk about being independent working women.

Barbara – now room-spinningly high from Pandy’s pot brownies – then chats with Marc Allen, a Hollywood agent. He’s also an admirer and vaguely interested in representing her – but she’s not looking for another agent.

Not until she again meets with Ted Sargent. Having woken up at Pandy’s home and told she could stay as long as she liked, as long as she fed the snake, she eventually makes her way to meet Ted. Trying to stand up for herself after the pans of her show, she calls Marc at his hotel, pretending he’s her agent. Marc doesn’t help – but then Ted’s secretary enters and says that they need to find a replacement on a show for a young singer who has gotten pregnant out of wedlock – they can’t be showing a pregnant woman, much less an unmarried pregnant woman, on TV.

Still on the phone with Marc, Barbara begins auditioning for Ted by imitating the various replacement singers he suggests, all of whom are tied up. Marc tells Barbara she nailed it and to stop and see him sometime, and Ted gives her the job.

Barbara extracts one condition from the desperate Ted: Dennis, Bill, and Tony can come back.

As she happily leaves the station, she runs into Dennis, who was coming to find her. His lawyer has found a loophole that will allow him and Edith to get divorced without admitting adultery: they have to wait three years, and stay away from other relationships that whole time.

Barbara tells Dennis that she’ll wait, and they can quietly be together in the meantime, but he doesn’t think it’s possible. They nearly kiss, but Dennis pulls away, gets in a cab, and drives off.