When you’re seven years old, watching television shows made for grown-ups feels like a big deal. You’re probably not new to TV–you may have been raised on a steady diet of Sesame Street and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, or perhaps Full House and its TGIF ilk, or, most likely, some combination thereof–but the first adult TV show that becomes the object of the weekly viewing ritual is formative. It’s probably the first half-hour or hour-long period of time during which your dad is not visibly exasperated by the silliness or triviality of your favorite shows. It may be the first time that you don’t understand some of the dialogue or why your mom is laughing loudly in line with laugh track. There are usually at least a few on-screen fights or adult kisses, and always the occasional “hell” or “damn” uttered. It’s permission to enter a club formerly barred to you, at least until you’re shooed off to bed–where, if you were anything like me, you’d secretly read in bed under the covers until the theme music to Monday Night Football or NYPD Blue finally lulled you to sleep.

The Nanny was my personal ticket to the world of prime-time television. It premiered on November 3, 1993, when I was a month shy of seven years old, and aired for six seasons. Every Monday or Wednesday night, depending on the season, my parents and I sat down on our beige leather couch at 8pm to watch Fran Fine’s exploits as the brassy Jewish nanny for a brood of neurotic upper-class WASPs and on-again, off-again love interest of Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy), a widowed Broadway producer and the father of her three charges. Over the course of the show’s run, as the Sheffield kids aged, two on-screen weddings transpired, my younger brother was born, and I switched schools twice, I began staying up later and learned to prefer Seinfeld and Dawson’s Creek. As a perennially unpopular kid, the last thing I wanted to do was admit to watching and loving a TV show that, it seemed, only my parents tuned into; not being all that into Titanic or crushing on Leonardo DiCaprio was quite enough to mark me as a social pariah, thank you.  For a while after its run ended, I managed to forget about The Nanny entirely.

And yet, twenty years after its pilot aired, I find myself continually returning to The Nanny, to no one’s greater surprise than my own. At first glance, the show is uninspired at best and totally hackneyed at worst, a mash-up of elements culled from The Sound of Music, Who’s the Boss?, and I Love Lucy with broad Borscht Belt humor and single-woman jokes thrown in for good measure and just a dash of a Horatio Alger tale. Its stock in trade seems to be Jewish stereotypes and absurd couplings: Jew and WASP, American and British, outer-borough New York and the Upper East Side, working-class and upper-crust, brashness and repression, British English and Yiddishisms are but a few of the pairings from which the plot points and jokes are derived. However, The Nanny’s charm doesn’t lie in its narrative arcs; if anything, the plot is only a pretense, a means of stringing together the zingers, one-liners, double entendres, costuming decisions, quirky characters, and parade of guest stars that make the show worth watching. Really, it’s a character-driven show, all of whom could easily fall into the realm of caricature but are consistently endearing and evolving (though it’s worth noting that some of the show’s best characters have limited to no screen time.)

Not convinced that The Nanny is worth a 20th-anniversary rewatch? Fair enough. It’s an easy show to forget about, to reduce to Fran Fine’s nasal laugh, or to relegate to the Hallmark Channel syndication heap and all that that implies. It deserves so much more than that, though, and not just because I look for an episode to revisit whenever I feel particularly depressed, or need to sleep, or when I’m home visiting my mom and it’s 2am and she’s decided it’s time to haul out the peanut M&Ms and watch reruns of whatever’s on digital cable.

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It may be fourteen years since The Nanny ended its run, but it still feels impossible to talk about without discussing Fran Fine, which, in turn, necessitates talking about Fran Drescher.  Nannying gig aside, Fran Fine is Fran Drescher. The biographical parallels are explicit: Fran the woman and Fran the character both grew up in Jamaica, Queens; attended Hillcrest High School with Ray Romano, who made a cameo as her former classmate in the season 5 episode “The Reunion Show” (and, of course, starred in his own CBS sitcom, the more popular but utterly insipid [aggressively mediocre?] Everybody Loves Raymond); have an older sister named Nadine and parents named Sylvia and Morty, with Sylvia and Morty Drescher appearing as Fran’s Uncle Stanley and Aunt Rose in several episodes. (Fran Drescher is also a rape survivor, a uterine cancer survivor, a survivor of stalking–as a Radiolab segment notes, she hired professional laughers to fill the studio audience of The Nanny to prevent her stalker from gaining entrance to the set–and served as a U.S. Diplomacy Envoy for women’s health issues. Let the record state that she is, in other words, what is commonly referred to as a “bad bitch.”)

Admittedly, I’m not convinced that what makes Fran Fine such a fascinating sitcom character is her resemblance to Fran Drescher. Nor am I sure that the contemporary debates about whether The Nanny was “good for the Jews” or a feminist show provided anything interesting to say about Fran Fine the character, just that there was something about her worthy of discussion. As one of the few Jewish woman protagonists heading a sitcom–Molly Goldberg in The Goldbergs and Rhoda Morgenstern in her eponymous spinoff of The Mary Tyler Moore Show are the only shows that similarly come to mind–Fran provokes both celebration and barbed criticism. One Jewish feminist academic, Joyce Antler, went so far as to write in an essay entitled “Jewish Women on Television: Too Jewish or Not Jewish Enough?” that Drescher’s character was “the kind of coarse, greedy, and selfish Jew that any anti-Semite might envision…a Jewish nightmare, not a dream about which Jews or women may be proud” (1998, 248.) Such absolutism feels out of place when considering The Nanny, a show that seemed to enjoy subverting the exact stereotypes that it was believed to perpetuate.

What does make Fran a great character, and one whose show is always worth watching, can only partially be attributed to her unabashed Jewishness at best (though, personally, the impact of seeing a television actress portraying a woman who had the same accent and similar mannerisms and sensibilities to the women in my own family of Queens-based New York Jews cannot be overstated.) Her relaxed attitudes toward class, sex, and parenting, for example, all of which are fodder for jokes that usually come at the expense of the conservative and consistently irritated Maxwell Sheffield, are more significant. In the wake of nearly forty years of Jewish-American princess stereotypes that assigned unrestrained materialism and maternal and sexual frigidity to young-to-middle-aged Jewish women, Fran’s general warmth and liberal attitudes toward the body (both hers and those of her charges) proved a notable departure from the previous sexist and borderline anti-Semitic tropes. This isn’t to say that she wasn’t interested in upward mobility or status objects–purchased at Loehmann’s for half off, of course–but her materialism was tempered in equal parts by her pride in her working-class roots and utter lack of pretension.

Subverting tired stereotypes isn’t quite enough to carry a sitcom for six seasons, though, so it helps that that Fran, with her half-price Loehmann’s getups, her easy one-liners, and her overall likability, composes one half of every meaningful relationship in the show (with one notable exception.) She is, by turns, paired with Maxwell Sheffield; the quippy British butler Niles; the comically antagonist and exquisitely WASPy C.C. Babcock; the three generally unremarkable Sheffield children (in order of age: Maggie, Brighton, and Gracie); her slightly dim best friend, Val Toriello; and the two previous generations of Fine women, the insatiable Sylvia and fanny-pack-wearing, cigarette-smoking, sexually active, and senile Grandma Yetta. The Nanny also featured in addition to its core ensemble a veritable cornucopia of guest stars, the vast majority of whom also played off of or with Fran. God forbid we forget the time that Jon Stewart had a role as Fran’s nice Jewish doctor boyfriend and simultaneously starred in Fran’s mid-makeout Dynasty fantasy in the season 5 episode “Kissing Cousins”:

The only relationship on the show that doesn’t revolve around Fran Fine is the adversarial one that exists between Niles and C.C. It’s a comic coupling brought to the point of absurdity by Niles’ penchant for dancing in sunglasses and shirtsleeves when no one’s looking, campy tastes, and occasional allusions to being gay (“I’m afraid I’m feeling a bit queer,” he tells Fran in a season 1 episode; “Don’t ask, don’t tell, but for God’s sake, come out of the closet,” she replies) and C.C.’s devotion to sabotaging Fran Fine and her burgeoning romance with Maxwell in every episode. The scenes between the two opponents, whose constant barbs eventually transform into a particularly caustic manifestation of lust, are worth watching for the joy of witnessing Daniel Davis and Lauren Hunt gleefully taunt one another at a breakneck pace. Their eventual romantic pairing is by turns fraught (C.C. flat-out refuses Niles’ proposals of marriage on several occasions due to his lower social station, leading the butler to occasional fits of desperation) and fated. Watching two characters who love to hate one another begin to fall in love may seem a banal pleasure, but on this show, it’s a particularly enjoyable one.

A worthwhile conversation about The Nanny would isn’t be complete without a nod given to the show’s costuming decisions, a blend of high fashion–a 1994 LA Times article cites the inclusion of pieces by Moschino, Norma Kamali, Dolce and Gabbana, and one-time guest star Todd Oldham–with K-Mart and garage sale finds. As the woman who, according to the series theme song, is “the lady in red while everyone else is wearing tan,” Fran Fine does in fact wear a good deal of red. She also sports a lot of black, animal prints, short skirts, high heels, and statement hats and accessories. Seamlessly melded into one glitzy fashion statement after another, Fran’s outfits are styled with such exact precision that they become, essentially, an extra character on the show. You may not care about the plot, but it’s difficult to forget Fran’s sartorial choices.

[credit: franfinesclothes.tumblr.com]

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The Nanny may not be a groundbreaking show.  It doesn’t reinvent any TV comedy tropes (even if it toys with them), nor does it possess particularly unique storylines or plots.  It doesn’t chronicle an indelible time in American history. It has a laugh track.  It is, perhaps, unserious. But, if nothing else, it is a sweet, always funny sitcom starring a badass woman with a knack for good comedic timing.  For me, at six years old and at 26 years old, that’s more than enough. Hopefully, it’s enough for you, too.