Fran in New York

From the Dirt archive. Marianela D’Aprile finds that The Nanny is different than she remembered.

Earlier this year, I started rewatching The Nanny and then stopped when the sexual-romantic tension between Fran and Mr. Sheffield became the only thing driving the series forward. My rewatch was primarily motivated by a general malaise and a need for something other than drugs to help me fall asleep. Once I started, though, I realized I’d never actually really seen the show.  

I grew up watching it as a kid in 1990s Argentina; it aired on one of the five open-access channels our antenna picked up. In the very specific context of a country whose economy was booming before it would fatally crash, The Nanny was a huge hit. It gave us direct access to a world of absurd riches through the eyes of an outsider—we could flirt with wealth while holding it at a distance. We watched it for this dalliance, and we also watched it to see if Fran and Mr. Sheffield would finally get together. Dubbed into Spanish and beamed into the living rooms of people who had no clue of the difference between Brooklyn and Queens, many of the jokes didn’t translate or, just as often, didn’t even exist. The intrigue, though, the drama of a nanny in love with a boss who loves her back but won’t make a goddamned move—that did not need translation. We knew he was an idiot. We knew she was desperate. We still wanted them to get together.

Watching it as an adult now fluent in English, I found myself not caring at all about the love story. Maybe it’s because I knew they end up together, but half the time I found myself wishing Mr. Sheffield would just go away. I cheered every time Fran and Niles the butler teamed up against him, their relationship equal parts friendship and class solidarity. I delighted in every scene where Fran, a Jewess from Flushing, made CC, a purebred WASP heiress, look like a clueless idiot. I thought, fine, let stupid Max end up with frigid CC. They deserve each other. I felt like the show was revealing itself to me in an entirely new way.

THE REWATCH

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