Sometimes, you just need to “pour it out” with close friends and a pitcher of margaritas. That was especially true when Netflix’s “Sweet Magnolias” first aired in May 2020 when we’d all been socially isolating and sheltering in place just long enough to forget what it was like before COVID, before we could only see our friends in Zoom boxes or standing 6 feet apart.
When the South Carolina-set show based on the books by Sherryl Woods first premiered, I was still mourning the loss of my mom to cancer. That fresh grief exacerbated the loneliness and isolation I felt while taking care of a 6-week-old and a 21-month-old while my husband worked from home, and I ached for normalcy. I wished that I could escape the crying and tantrums and endless diaper changes for a night away from home to “pour it out” (literally or metaphorically) with a close friend.
But, I couldn’t. Instead, I watched the show’s three best friends — Maddie (JoAnna Garcia Swisher), Helen (Heather Headley) and Dana Sue (Brooke Elliott) — meet for their weekly margarita night, and immersed myself in the romances and family dramas they navigated while taking care of each other.
While the small-town setting and dialogue was often filled with stereotypical southern phrases and overly saccharine exchanges, the sweetness of the show was comforting at a time when I needed to be taken care of. I felt the same way about the show’s second season, which was a bright spot during the winter of 2022.
However, by the third season, I wondered if the show had lost its charm. That season, the show shifted from a gentle soap opera to an almost unwatchable mess. The exchanges between characters were too emotionally wrought, the plot was meandering, and the stakes were so low that I almost didn’t finish watching it. Also, as someone who lives in Memphis, I didn’t know if I could get past the caricature of the South that the show had become.
I didn’t plan on watching the fourth season. However, when the trailer for the new season aired with the three best friends clinking their salt-rimmed glasses, I wanted to watch them “toast hope, love, and occasionally top-tier gossip.” While the writing is still overly sentimental and overwrought (almost every line of dialogue is a heartfelt exchange), this season was better, and, like the first two, it is being released at a time when a comfort watch is exactly what I need.
The fourth season begins with a time jump that is a little jarring at first. Maddie and her ex-baseball-playing beau are still together but are now engaged, and she has published the children’s book she was working on with her daughter and mother. Helen is still broken up from her first love, Ryan (good riddance!), but is now dating a new character while helping Mayor Peggy (she apparently ran and won), and obviously pining for Chef Erik (Dion Johnstone). Dana Sue has stepped back from her restaurant to spend more time on the community foundation that she started with the money the town matriarch, Frances Wingate (Cindy Karr), left her last season.
There’s also a new group of younger friends, the self-proclaimed “Mini Magnolias.” Last season, Dana Sue’s 16-year-old daughter Annie (Anneliese Judge) wished for friends that would be as close as sisters, and now CeCe (Harlan Drum) and Lily (Artemis) have become her own, (non-alcoholic) beverage-sharing trio.
Because the first episode begins in media res, it takes a bit to put all these pieces together, to figure out which plot threads the show teased at the end of Season 3 and decided to follow. However, by the end of the first few episodes, the season unfolds with more direction than the one that came before.
Part of this is because it has a stronger framework. The season is structured around the holidays. Without spilling any (sweet) tea, I’ll only reveal that the show opens with a Halloween episode and ends with a Christmas one. In between, the season is a mix of personal and natural disasters that the members of Serenity handle with their hallmark grace and hospitality as they work to save their town that the previously corrupt mayor has put in financial jeopardy. There’s also a healthy helping of what Helen would refer to as “Tabasco” spicy romance (read family friendly) as some couples commit to their relationships more fully and others fall in love.
Ultimately, this season of “Sweet Magnolias” fulfills its promise as a heartfelt drama. At its core, it continues to be a show about what it means to be a good friend to your best friends, your neighbors, and even the people whom you can’t stand (like Cathy, Dana Sue’s sister-in-law who does make another appearance). While this season, like the three previous ones, includes some overly-emotive dialogue and cringey oversimplifications of the South, I didn’t care as much about that as much I did in Season 3.
Maybe this is because these shortcomings don’t feel like such terrible things at this particular moment in time. Maybe I am willing to give this show the benefit of the doubt that the people of Serenity so often extend to each other because I yearn for the community they have created and fight to maintain. Maybe it’s just not such a bad thing to hyperbolize kindness in a world that is neither gentle nor kind.
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While the grace in “Sweet Magnolias” may be oppressively present, grace is something I know that I desperately need right now. I’m not as isolated or lonely as I was in March 2020, but I am just as anxious and uncertain about the future.
Unlike the early weeks of the pandemic, we can gather and “pour it out” with those closest to us, but it’s hard to talk to anyone right now without feeling the way their palpable stress mirrors our own. From illness during this winter’s “quad-emic” to the rising cost of everything to the increasingly divisive actions of an executive branch that is creating chaos and sowing separation and dehumanizing our neighbors, it’s hard to feel hopeful about anything, especially our country.
This season of “Sweet Magnolias” is a good reminder that in the midst of struggle, “pouring it out” still matters. As Maddie says as town spokesperson, the challenges the town has faced have “strengthened everyone’s resolve to give of their time and talents to help their neighbors.” The notion may sound like a “quaint” platitude (or an example of how heavy-handed the show’s writing is), but right now, I find myself being drawn to language like that, to hope and kindness, and, if nothing else, this season of “Sweet Magnolia” serves up a heaping of that.