5 Reasons to Watch Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi on Amazon Prime

Tig Notaro’s half hour comedy One Mississippi dropped its first full season on Amazon Prime this month, and it’s well worth a watch. The series follows Notaro as a fictionalized version herself as she returns to her hometown when her mother dies very suddenly. Much like the real-life Notaro, her character has recently experienced an avalanche of tragedy and bad news, having lived through breast cancer and a double mastectomy, followed immediately by a debilitating intestinal disorder, C-Diff. As Notaro sifts through her mother’s belongings in her childhood home, she must reckon with her painful childhood, her mother’s secrets, and the distance of those family members closest to her, like her socially awkward stepfather, Bill, who reminds her, “We aren’t legally related anymore.” And yes, this is a comedy. One with a dark humor and fewer laugh lines than you might expect, but still a comedy.

Here’s why One Mississippi’s quick six episodes are worth a chunk of your streaming time.

1. The tone

One Mississippi is definitely a show for folks willing (or perhaps needing) to laugh at sadness and pain or who possess what we commonly call a dark sense of humor. At varying points the show manages to laugh about cancer, illness, death, child molestation, and even the terrifying commonness of sexual assault. It’s never at the expense of the victim (who’s usually the one cracking the joke), and rather than being horrifying, Notaro draws out the absurdities that arise in pain and grief—like the customer survey her mother received from the hospital where she died. First question: “Were you satisfied with our service?” The result of this attunement to irony is poignant, melancholic and funny, but never maudlin.

2. If offers a nuanced portrait of Southerners

Tig’s Mississippi hometown of Bay Saint Lucille is very Southern, but never stereotypical. There’s plenty a Southern accent to be had, but the folks Tig grew up with—whether she feels a kinship with them or not—are never played as dumb and never used for a quick or easy joke. They do, however, have distinct personalities that make each of them absurd or funny in their own way, like her brother, Remy (Noah Harpster), and his Civil War reenactments (don’t worry, he’s a Union Captain), or the oldest man in town who takes the role of Mardi Gras King but can’t stop repeating himself. And then there’s Tig’s stepfather, Bill (John Rothman), who’s attempting to reach out to Tig and Remy, but instead doles out rigid reminders to turn off the hall light the second one exits the hallway.