http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/arts/television/tig-notaro-one-mississippi-review.html 2016-09-09 01:09:12 Review: Have You Heard the One About the Grieving Daughter? The comedian Tig Notaro stars in Amazon’s tender-funny “One Mississippi,” in which a loss brings a troubled family together. === It’s been said that comedy is tragedy plus time. Lately, it’s been more like tragedy minus a half-hour. Many of TV’s best, most ambitious recent series — Amazon, where the six-episode season appears Friday, describes the series as a “traumedy.” It leads with the “trau.” Tig Bavaro (Tig Notaro), a radio host in Los Angeles, returns to Bay St. Lucille, Miss., where her mother, Caroline (Rya Kihlstedt), is being taken off life support. On top of that, Tig is recovering from a double mastectomy. And on top of Laughing yet? You might be, actually, though the laughs generated by the first episode are the cathartic kind, drawing on the disorienting, uncanny experience of confronting the empty shell that used to contain someone you loved. After Tig’s mother dies, for instance, Tig fantasizes being told that she has to bring the body home with her. She wheels the deathbed through the hospital corridor as the staff cheer and wish her well. Snapping back to reality, Tig finds herself lost in a hallway. “I don’t know how to leave,” she tells a nurse. “One Mississippi” is about how you can never really leave — not your home, not your good and bad memories, not even the dead and buried. Tig ends up extending her visit as she deals with her mother’s estate, confronts buried issues from her past and manages a long-distance relationship with her flighty girlfriend, Brooke (Casey Wilson). The series starts with an ending, then simultaneously moves backward and forward. Ms. Notaro, a comedian, created the series with the screenwriter If Remy is sweet but emotionally stunted, a middle-aged teacher who hasn’t had a girlfriend since high school. Bill is so uptight he considers it cheating to pause a coffee maker to pour a cup before the full pot has brewed. (“I prefer to let the machine complete its process,” he says.) With shellshocked Tig, the house becomes a halfway home for incomplete adults, absent Caroline, who had been the glue connecting them. Caroline becomes a character, too, a Southern-vivacious life force in flashbacks and fantasies. But as Tig settles her family’s affairs, she learns things about her mother that clash with her gauzy memories. “One Mississippi” becomes a study of how identity, in a family, is a group project — we often edit our loved ones into the people we want them to be. As can happen when comedians star in series, Ms. Notaro often seems to be narrating her scenes more than experiencing them. She has a low-key charm, but the scenes in which she talks about her life on the radio feel more immediate than Tig’s experiences in the moment. There is a power, though, to having Ms. Notaro herself star in this personal story about the fragility of the body, her mother’s and her own. (As she has in her standup, she reveals her mastectomy scars to bold effect.) And her supporting cast is strong, especially the terrific Mr. Rothman, who locates the stress fractures of emotion beneath Bill’s sheer granite face. The season’s arc, in which Tig and Bill confront long-buried family secrets, brings out the best in both performers. “One Mississippi” tries to hit many notes in its short run — grief, light comedy, anger, small-town whimsy — and the shifts can be jarring. But if you binge the show at a stretch, the conflicting tones resolve into something like the happy-sad-exhausted emotional overload you feel after a wake. Is that comedy? Tragedy? Mel Brooks, in “The 2000 Year Old Man,” once defined the two. “Tragedy is if I cut my finger,” he said, adding, “Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.” For Ms. Notaro, as for many artists in today’s confusing, rewarding field of not-just-comedy, the distinctions are not so absolute. Cut fingers or death, it’s all material.