Miranda Levi

There are some shows you watch casually, half-scrolling your phone, half-paying attention, letting the plot wash over you while you fold laundry or answer emails. And then there are shows that grab you by the face within the first ten minutes and demand your full, undivided attention.

For us, this week, that show is Smigadoon.

My husband and I started it for the first time tonight, and I still cannot tell whether the show is genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve seen in years or whether the green cookies we ate beforehand enhanced the experience in a way science should probably study. Either way, I was crying laughing by the end of the first episode.

There is something about the tone of it that hit me perfectly. It’s sharp and absurd and self-aware in exactly the right ways. At one point, a character says, “Find that bridge and cross it right now,” and I completely lost it. Gone. Finished. Spiritually separated from my body.

Even stranger, and somehow funnier, was that the FMC kept saying things right after I said them out loud. Not once or twice. Enough times that I started to feel either deeply understood or mildly stalked by the writers’ room.

My husband was also laughing, which made the whole thing even better.

Now, to be fair, my husband is not what anyone would call a quiet viewer.

He is a commentator. A narrator. A man who cannot simply watch a movie when he could also provide a running stream of actor trivia, directorial references, production thoughts, comparisons to three other films, and at least one opinion no one asked for but which he will deliver with total confidence anyway. Watching television with him often feels like I accidentally turned on a bonus feature track.

Most of the time, I don’t mind. Sometimes I even enjoy it. On a second or third watch, his commentary can be part of the fun.

And I am, if nothing else, a repeat watcher.

I have been married for two and a half years, but I have been in a deeply committed, increasingly unhealthy relationship with Grey’s Anatomy for about twenty-two. At this point, I do not watch comfort shows so much as return to them like a pensioned ghost haunting familiar ground. So if he wants to talk through the second or two-hundredth rewatch of something I know by heart, fine. That is part of the household ecosystem.

But certain shows require silence the first time through. Or at least reverence. I need room to take them in properly, to get attached, to absorb every joke and every weird little detail before anyone starts giving me the IMDb page out loud.

Smigadoon turned out to be one of those shows.

So we’re watching, and I am fully locked in. Somewhere during one scene, a line comes up about a ball sack. At roughly the same time, my husband is also talking. I need to stress that I was not listening to him. I was listening to the show, because unlike my husband, I know how to respect live theater, even when it is fictional and streaming.

Then, in one perfectly timed moment, he lifted his shirt to scratch himself and said, “Ball sack.”

That is all he said.

Just those two words.

But because my brain was already processing the line from the show and whatever else he had been rambling about, it accidentally stitched everything together into a sentence he absolutely did not say — and let me tell you, the version my brain created was so wildly inappropriate, so startlingly foul, that I just sat there staring at him in shocked silence.

This man is, generally speaking, a gentleman. He is thoughtful, kind, and usually very respectful, especially when it comes to women. He is not prone to random vulgarity in a way that would prepare me for what I thought I’d just heard.

For one split second, I truly believed I had just witnessed some hidden, deeply unhinged side of him emerge in the middle of a musical comedy.

And then, before I could even ask what he meant, he casually followed it up with something less than chivalrous.

So.

That cleared nothing up.

This is one of the things no one fully explains about marriage. It is not just romance or partnership or building a life together. It is also sitting side by side while a musical parody unfolds onscreen, one of you trying to absorb the plot while the other offers commentary that ranges from insightful to absolutely feral, and somehow finding that deeply endearing.

It is knowing each other well enough to be annoyed and amused at the exact same time.

It is being able to think, with total sincerity, I love this person so much, even while they are actively ruining my first watch of something.

It is also realizing that some of your happiest moments will not look especially glamorous from the outside. They will look like laughing too hard on the couch, teasing each other through three episodes of a ridiculous show, and collecting little moments so bizarre they become their own kind of love language.

By the time we finished for the night, I was not just charmed by Smigadoon. I was charmed by the whole absurd experience of watching it together. The show is delightful. My husband is ridiculous.

In other words, it was a very good night.

If I were to offer one official review, it would be this: Smigadoon is best enjoyed with someone you love, a willingness to laugh at yourself.

Though in fairness, if he ever stops talking entirely, I’ll probably miss that too.