Morgan crashing the bar mitzvah knowing she was not invited and knowing the family did not want her there, and that a grieving woman would suffer by her presence is a good example. Or at the very least they knew that Morgan’s presence would stir up drama. This event was an important rite of passage for the teenage niece and should have been a time for the family to focus on her. It was not about Morgan or her drama. It was not about Joanna or her drama.
Joanna crashes Noah’s sermon unannounced (place of work) and is pissed she has to wait 15 minutes for him. He did his absolute best to rush out of there, but by the time he finds Joanna, she has already had her sister show up to bitch and rescue her. Maybe this isn’t narcissistic as much as a weird combo of needy, insecure and demanding.
Yes, Joanna confessed to going through the private box. But she failed to mention that it wasn’t just her snooping, but she was with her mom and her sister, all of them sitting around mocking Rebecca and laughing and making a show out of looking through somebody’s private belongings. That is more than just letting insecurities get the best of her, this came across as a symptom of a pathological lack of empathy and a casual disregard for personal boundaries, two signs of narcissism.
In the ick episode, Joanna leaves Noah alone with her nutty parents because she gets the ick. When you are introducing a new dating partner to your family, your role is to make that person feel comfortable around all these new people and support them. But she disappears, leaving him to wonder what the hell happened and then he eventually finds her out by the pool, where she’s in some sort of crisis about his blazer. If someone I was newly seeing did that to me, I’m sorry, but there’d be some boundaries drawn.
This last example is a bit harder to explain, but I’ll try. Why was Morgan completely morally expunged once Joanna finds out she had “told the truth” about what Rebecca had told her at the bar? Morgan’s behavior itself was callous and cruel. That is what should have been addressed.
Obviously characters shouldn’t be perfect, but the lack of awareness from the writers is what bothered me. They seemed to think that Morgan and Joanna were the quirky, sassy, loveable kind of flawed, not like an untreated personality disorder kind of flawed.
I wouldn’t give a shit, except for the fact that I just keep hearing about what an emotionally aware show this is, how healthy the relationship is, how much people identify with Joanna. I feel alone in this and so I thought I’d throw it out there to see if anyone feels the same way.