Poking fun at the demands placed on women in the workplace and at home as well as our changing roles, she portrays a seventy-something expectant mother. Then, moving from pathos to irony, she boldly dons black makeup and evolves into the most famous actress from Malawi who comes to America to adopt a child (in reverse Madonna and Angelina Jolie fashion) and takes on a soap opera feel in her “minisodes” about a married woman engaging in a torrid affair with her equally married boss after hours. Going for broader laughs, we encounter Chanel Monticello, an airport security agent who x-rays passengers who don’t have health insurance and a woman who runs “Dignity Village,” an Arizona community for women over the age of thirty-five who never want “to be seen in public again.”
While on the surface some critics may accuse Ullman of having a left-wing agenda, Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union takes equal shots at those on the left as well as the right, hitting extremely hard in the direction of environmental activist Laurie David (ex-wife of Seinfeld creator Larry David) who she plays as egomaniacal and self-righteous as well as others. Yet while David hasn’t commented on the portrayal and Huffington and Brown have expressed their pleasure with Ullman and the show, Union encompasses all views and really paints a fascinatingly relatable if comically exaggerated portrait of where we are as a country.
Having become an American citizen herself as Ullman revealed in a Showtime promo, the British actress seems dead-set on not only making us laugh but also making us think with her witty, razor-sharp satire. Visiting dozens of characters in each episode as narrator Peter Strauss and the music of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony weaves us from one sketch to the next, it seems custom built for our dwindling attention spans yet at the same time beneficial in assuring maximum hilarity by never overstaying its welcome in one particular situation for more than a few minutes.
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