In a recent episode of NBC’s Mr. Mayor, Holly Hunter’s Deputy Mayor Arpi Meskimen strolls into the office of a lovelorn coworker who believes office relationships will never work and, out of nowhere, starts waxing poetic about an old office crush she regrets not getting “her jollies when the Jolly Rancher rolled through town”.
She plops herself on a desk, makes dreamy eyes, and talks about how Councilman Yitzhak Schimmel was a “whole snack” with “chest hairs sprouting like onion grass” and “payos blowing in the wind.” (I may or may or may not have just rewatched this bit because the way she talks about this guy just sends me.)
It’s a brief moment, but a genuinely funny one. In fact, everything Hunter is doing on the show is hilarious, so why aren’t more people talking about it?
Mr. Mayor started off as an NBC sitcom like any other: the kind of perfectly fine series that goes largely ignored, only to slowly but surely improve and gain traction online with each passing episode. You’d be forgiven for not having watched it. The Tina Fey and Robert Carlock series was, at first, not especially well received, and the production of its first season was cut short by four episodes due to COVID-19. But the series has recently returned, better than ever before.
Unlike 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—shows that felt fully fleshed out from the moment they began—Mr. Mayor needed time to find itself. On first watch, its talented cast felt less like actual characters and more like broad sketches of people that had no real reason for existing with each other beyond “working together,” a trap that many a workplace sitcom falls into. But after revisiting the series, it’s easy to see just how much it actually worked right from the start.
This isn’t to diminish some of its early missteps, notably its inability to make Ted Danson’s mayor and his daughter, Orly (Kyla Kenedy), organically fit in with the rest of his rag-tag crew. Perhaps recognizing this, the series began pairing the actor with a number of wonderful guest stars (Missi Pyle, Andie MacDowell, and, this season, Fran Drescher). Fey, Carlock, and their writers used this to their advantage, letting the rest of the cast bounce off each other in surprising ways. Every episode offered a new mash-up or pairing of actors Vella Lovell, Bobby Moynihan, Mike Cabellon, and, of course, Holly Hunter, with some of the best (like “Respect in the Workplace” and “Hearts Before Parts”) placing them all together to great effect.
Six episodes into its second season, the series and its actors seem to have reached an ideal balance, though one actor remains far and above the best of the bunch: Holly Hunter, who plays Deputy Mayor Arpi, the foil to Danson’s self-absorbed and unprepared head honcho. Arpi is a workaholic of sorts, determined in every way to make the relatively incompetent staff work to her benefit. Hunter’s work here feels distinctly tied to her past.
Looking at shows like 30 Rock, Great News, and Mr. Mayor, it’s hard not to see the influence of Hunter on Fey and her successors, specifically her iconic role and performance in James L. Brooks’ Broadcast News. After all, Jane Craig is something of a less neurotic prototype for Liz Lemon, is she not? A passionate single woman trying to have it all in love and in the business of television? It feels like Fey studied practically every character that appears in Broadcast News for her own work, stacking eccentricities and exaggerations onto their relative realism in order to create an ideal sitcom (which is precisely what 30 Rock is and always will be).
Arpi, though, is the exact opposite of Craig (and, thus, of the typical Fey protagonist). Yes, she’s a workaholic and committed to her job, as many of Hunter’s characters in film and television are. But the lack of any real personal life or consistent background outside of her workplace confidence is precisely what makes her pop. She’s both a sharply drawn character and a comedic blank slate. A classic Tina Fey Show brilliant enigma, a great example of one of her go-to tropes in which, the more talented a character is, the stranger they are, too.
She’s the kind of character where both everything and nothing about her biography seems to have been planned out or written. Any new feature that the writers decide to throw her way feels appropriate because, frankly, anything would make sense for her to do. It’s not quite on the same level of zaniness and escalation as the many things Tracy Jordan and Jenna Maroney would say or do, but more like grounded nonsense.
Take the way the series has always taken advantage of Hunter’s tiny frame (the actress is 5 foot 2 inches). Where Season 1 had her bursting into rooms with her loud voice or sprinting through halls, Season 2 has leaned into her wiliness.
The premiere, “Most Fast and Break Things”, delightfully throws Hunter into frame with her coworkers. She keeps popping out of absolutely nowhere, eventually revealing that she had been, in fact, traveling through the vents of the office. As she notes in her glorious deadpan when asked where she came from, “I’m like a mouse. If my skull fits, the rest of my body fits.” The joke is simple, but hilarious because of Hunter’s delivery. Then there’s the physical-comedy kicker: Hunter ducks in between two filing cabinets and disappears into thin air.
Mr. Mayor, and Hunter in particular, excel at both visual and verbal comedy. Fey and her writers seem to take as much pleasure in crafting the most absurd statements for Hunter to say out loud (“PPPORN” which stands for “Private Plane Paths Over Residential Neighborhoods” or the abundance of stupid water-themed jokes that populate the “Avocado Crisis” episodes) as they do in having the actress embrace the physical. Season 2’s “The Illusion of Choice” is an exquisite showcase of the latter.
Arguably one of the series’ best episodes yet (with an excellent guest spot by Maria Bamford), the episode finds Hunter and Danson’s characters together obsessing over a garbage can with the mayor’s face plastered on it that people keep throwing trash at. Danson’s discomfort at watching his mouth stuffed with everything from hot dogs to full diapers is one thing, but it’s something Hunter does that results in the most laughter. Out of nowhere, she whips out a ton of peanut shells from her pocket and tosses them at the trash can’s open mouth.
The absurdist concept itself is amusing enough—why were there peanut shells in her pocket?—but the gesture and velocity of the toss, somewhere between a softball pitch and a half-assed video game punch, expertly executed by Hunter and almost impossible to describe, is a work of art. That the episode continues to escalate the gag by having Hunter throw her peanuts again and again, most of them missing the actual trash and spreading like shotgun fire, is irresistible. Her last toss, at Danson’s actual face instead of the trash can, is the perfect punchline.
Explaining comedy does it no favors, and one’s mileage may certainly vary with it, but Mr. Mayor is one of few sitcoms on air that’s actually, consistently, funny (alongside other Fey adjacent shows like Saved by the Bell and Girls5Eva, both underrated treasures that deserve your attention). And for all the talk there has been over the last decade about actresses turning to television for their best performances, not enough has been noted about just how rich comedy can be for performers like Hunter who excel at comedy as much as drama. As great as she has been in shows like Top of the Lake and Succession, there’s just something about Mr. Mayor that feels like the ideal home for the actress, and we should all be taking note of that.
