Bless This Mess is Not Believable, But That’s Not the Point
When navigating the complexities and noise of city life with children, it’s easy to become swept away by the noise and simply bail on all of it—phones, proximity to rolled ice cream, choice of yoga studios—everything. That’s the plan of Rio (Lake Bell) and Mike (Dax Shepard) in ABC’s Bless This Mess, who ditch their hipster lives in Manhattan in exchange for an inherited farm in Nebraska. Rio thinks she’ll be “living in a Pinterest page”; Mike wants to… do stuff… with his hands, or something.
They’re able to do this because they have no children and, apparently, neither does anybody in Nebraska. Rio and Mike do adopt a flock of chickens named after what’s probably their first 75 Instagram follows (“Not everything is about you!” Rio yells at a hen she’s attempting to herd), but this show functions more about the idea of community as extended family.
New York is a culture unto itself, and it’s not entirely believable that a professional couple would bolt this island of convenience and mixology on the basis of one rude pedestrian and a lost job, but what does ring true is the show’s examination of how we simultaneously battle and cooperate with our environment to provide stability and meaning for our families.
Bless This Mess, Photo: ABC
The foundation of Bless This Mess rests on one of the oldest tropes in entertainment—fish out of water who learn from their new situation and, of course, teach their new acquaintances as well. Their house is a tumble-down disaster, and often, that’s the daily muddle of child-rearing. But no matter the city mouse/country mouse packaging, this framework has reappeared in 2019 because it’s timeless. It speaks to what parenting itself is: a sudden plummet into a world you think you’ve studied about and prepared for, but upon arrival, it’s no softly filtered photograph. It’s a plunge through the floor, a study in humility, and a clash of preconceived notions against roof-crumbling reality.
– From the A Child Grows Writers Group
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