One Day at a Time (TV Series) Et tu, Ann? (1979) User Reviews

Putting the shoe on the other foot episode doesn't work.

[BigWhiskers · 2/10 · 22 September 2015]

I really didn't care much for this episode because it handled the whole subject as if it was one big joke just to give men something to applaud by having the woman be the aggressor. It just didn't make sense for Ann's character to do something that stupid and desperate. And her daughters immaturity about Ann hiring a man only for his looks really irritated me -I got really tired of Barbara and Julie playing the role of enablers and hypocrites. and that Ann started to agree with them some just puzzled me. Women of the time were always putting up with that kind of crap and to see a woman who could not stand that type of behavior become a hypocrite disappointed me.

All this time on ODAAT ,Ann was a strong driven woman with principles, to see her lowered to being a typical male type sleaze bucket was disappointing. The fact she made a veiled threat to her assistant regarding his job to get him to come over so she could try and seduce him seemed so out of character for her. Especially when she tried to justify her behavior to her boss who himself was a smarmy sleaze bucket that what she did was harmless looked so bad.

One thing I will say , In real life, Ann should have stopped her assistant from touching her and should have never allowed him to massage her. That is highly suggestive and totally unprofessional , unethical and just plain inappropriate. Again , this episode has Ann totally out of character and made her look like this desperate horny divorcée. And the rest of the family making wisecracks and low blows to her when she tells them what happened was in such poor taste. Especially her daughters and that bum of a son in law Max. They didn't seem to realize how serious what she did was , the end of the episode has her confront her assistant who accuses her of sexual harassment and he ends up quitting because he doesn't play that kind of game. Ann should have been fired and the company sued . it just was a badly written episode.

It's embarrassing to watch.

[Christopher370 · 1/10 · 4 June 2023]

Ann's behavior in this episode is so out of character that I wondered how it ever got approved to be made. Luring her young male assistant to her home under the guise of work and then making a blatant sexual pass at him was something Ann would just not do unless she was high on alcohol or drugs.

The whole scene when she lures him on the phone and then the attempted seduction in the apartment is cringy and uncomfortable to watch. And what makes things even worse was how her whole family was treating the situation lightly and even cracking jokes about it! What the hell?

Would they all be laughing if Barbara's male boss did the same to her?! The whole episode was very badly written and that ending was the worst of all because the employee felt so uncomfortable working there after what happened that he quit----yet Ann gets to stay with no repercussions. Wow.

She should have been immediately let go and the employee asked back. I do get the serious issue they were trying to portray here, but the writing and acting was so incredibly bad that it should've been scrapped or rewritten for a different show.

And what was with the droll boss cracking his dry jokes during the confrontation between the two?! Even the boss wasn't taking the issue as seriously as he should have. The whole episode was just a very cringy, uncomfortable and surreal 25 minutes.

Anti-backlash

[jarrodmcdonald-1 · 29 May 2015]

I just finished watching this episode on Antenna TV. I noticed it had two female writers-- Linda Marsh & Margie Peters (who also worked on 'The Facts of Life'). I wouldn't say this episode was ahead of its time because it showed women could be pigs like men. That was not the point at all. It was ahead of its time because it was forward in its thinking, looking at how women can impede their own progress. If women slip up, then men who are still threatened by their a dvancement would have a legitimate complaint that what feminists were accomplishing was nothing significant at all.

The main point of this 25-minute story was to show that for women to be taken seriously and make strides as real feminists, they cannot fall into the traps that their corrupt male counterparts do. It's a clarion call for empowerment in a more honest way that helps women take steps forward, not steps backward.

If you think about it, the episode functions as a cautionary feminist morality tale-- it's an anti-backlash story, one that would make Susan Faludi take notice.

An Episode Ahead Of Its Time

[toddkay · 1 October 2011]

This is a pretty amazing sitcom episode for its time, the late 1970's. Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin), the main character of the series, is a divorced single mom working as an executive at a public relations firm. This was a Norman Lear series, so Ann was a feminist and several episodes when Ann, her teenage daughters (MacKenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli) and other female characters deal with gender discrimination, including sexual harassment. In this episode, Ann hires a new assistant, a man to whom she is instantly attracted. She drops hints of her interest but he is not interested. She finally makes a blatant aggressive pass but he pushes her away and resigns the next day. This leads to a great scene at the end where Ann is trying to offer excuses to the assistant and their boss (John Hillerman). She is finally forced to admit what she did. The assistant leaves the office and Ann's boss leaves a few seconds later with a smirk on his face. He is an old fashioned type who does not like feminism and was enjoying the tables being turned, Ann being accused of sexual harassing a man. I thought it was not only a well done episode, it was ahead of its time.