Genre Trouble: Netflix’s Lady Dynamite and Self-Help Television

The focus in this chapter is on Mitchell Hurwitz’s Netflix show, Lady Dynamite (2016–2017)—an audacious and challenging comedy, drawn from the real life of comedian Maria Bamford. In formal terms, the show moves fluidly across time periods, signalled by a number of different visual ‘looks’, with Bamford’s life and work treated as a kind of experimental memoir or scripted stand-up special. Beyond the relentless structural and stylistic zaniness, argues Taveira, lies a sobering and unflinching exploration of mental illness and resilience, presented as ‘Self-Help TV.’ By exploiting the genre of the self-help manual and its adaptation histories, Taveira explores Lady Dynamite’s attempts to both appropriate therapeutic ambition and also subject it to unsparing ridicule. Considering adaptation alongside its source text, Bamford’s stand-up oeuvre, and a history of adapting women’s stand-up for TV, including Roseanne (1988–2018) and Fleabag (2016–2019), Taveira introduces both scripted stand-up and the self-help book as ‘performative infidelities’ (Stam, 2017), literature worthy of study and adaptation that sprouts texts with their own extended, limitless afterlives.