Life Without Molly

I often dream about TV shows. Sometimes it’s surreal episodes of a favorite show. Sometimes it’s a mash-up of two or three favorite shows. Every once in a while, it’s an original show. Like my dream about Life Without Molly.

If you weren’t around in the ’90s, lemme tell ya, TV comedies were largely…well, typical sitcoms. Fairly standard premises, filmed before a live studio audience that laughed and cheered. Roseanne, Seinfeld, Cheers, A Different World. (Not that I didn’t like that format because I did, and still do.) The single camera, no laugh track comedies that are the standard now were a rare novelty back then, an experimental outlier of half-hour situation comedies. Which is the kind of show Life Without Molly was when I dreamed about it in 1990 or ’91. I woke up from the dream thinking it would be a revolutionary TV show, partly because that kind of show was rare and partly because my sleep-stuffed brain often thinks my ideas are brilliant. (I wish I always had the confidence of my sleep-stuffed brain.) Later in the day, when I was more awake, the idea didn’t seem so innovative, although I still liked it.

The set-up of Life Without Molly was this: a single young man, living in New York City, working a low-level job at a publishing company, experiencing the roller coaster of trying to find romance in the wake of a young woman named Molly leaving him to live in California. No studio audience, no laugh track. The real twist was the title. It was meant to make the show appear to be about the main character getting over being dumped by a long-time girlfriend, but the Molly of the title was actually his platonic best friend who had moved across the country for a job. Each episode would have a framing device of the main character writing a letter to Molly or leaving her a message on her answering machine, telling her about the situation of that episode. It was based on my own feelings about me at college in Iowa and my best friend Margaret at college in Kansas. Sort of a When Harry Met Sally, if Sally had left New York and Harry missed her and wrote or called her often to talk about life–but without the romantic comedy ending. Just close friendship. So maybe not much like When Harry Met Sally.

I didn’t consciously realize it at the time, but it was another way in which my ambiguous feelings regarding platonic and romantic relationships were asserting themselves. But deep down, that’s what I felt was the real innovative spark of Life Without Molly–a platonic relationship that was at least as important as romantic ones. I look back at it now and see it as one of the puzzle pieces that fits into my ace-aro orientation. If only I’d had the concepts and language then to understand and express myself that way. But I do now, and that’s not nothing.