Now that Ella McCay is arriving on Hulu, viewers will have the chance to take the challenge at home. (Maybe they can adjust their slipper midstride?) Nearly anyone streaming it will find that certain criticisms of the film ring absolutely true. First and foremost: James L. Brooks, who was an ’70s sitcom titan via The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi, an ’80s Oscar darling with Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, and a ’90s shepherd of blockbusters in both cinema (As Good As It Gets) and TV (The Simpsons), does not have any of that juice in the 2020s, unless you count The Simpsons still being on and sometimes good.

Brooks seems to recognize this, too. He sets Ella McCay in late 2008, which his narrator (Julie Kavner) describes with wry knowingness as a time when people liked each other more. Uh, maybe. Which people, Jim? He doesn’t exactly name names, because despite the movie explicitly taking place during the 2008 financial crisis and cabinet-appointment season (which is to say, in the wake of the presidential election), the names “Barack Obama,” “John McCain,” or “George W. Bush” are not so much as obliquely alluded to, nevermind actually uttered. “Financial crisis” and different-styled phones are just about all you get for that ’08 feeling. The barely-subtext is that it’s set at this time because Brooks could still make sense of the world in 2008, which makes sense; after all, that was a full two years before his 2010 movie How Do You Know bombed expensively at the box office and presumably knocked some wind out of him.

The 2008 setting also allows flashbacks to Ella’s teenage years to get closer to the Brooks heyday, in the early 1990s. This would be especially convenient if any of the flashback scenes were a good idea. Instead, they have Mackey unconvincingly playing a 17-year-old in multiple scenes of hoary psychological baggage, where we learn that Ella has been let down by her philandering father (Woody Harrelson), bereaved by the death of her beloved mother (Rebecca Hall, clocking in for a single scene), and partially raised by her outspoken aunt (Jamie Lee Curtis, sometimes overdoing it). We also meet Ella’s younger brother Casey (Spike Fearn in his adult years) who later inexplicably shares a long scene with his ex-girlfriend Susan (Ayo Edebiri), a distracting break from Ella’s vantage point and a subplot that is abruptly dropped well before the movie ends.

Yes, it’s safe to say that Brooks, at the age of 85, is only slightly more convincing as a chronicler of urbane and anxious young people than Woody Allen. It’s also safe to say that against many odds, with an underdog scrappiness worthy of Governor McCay herself, Ella McCay is actually pretty charming. That is, Ella McCay herself is charming, because Emma Mackey gives what might be considered a superhuman performance in making her part seem playable at all.

The best decision Brooks makes is to build a movie about a character who plays a bit like the woman Lisa Simpson could only grow into through her show’s many what-if future-set episodes. Ella is wonky, policy-focused, serious-minded, earnest as hell, and, in classic (as well as less-than-classic) Brooks fashion, has to do a lot of thinking aloud that only superficially involves other people. Mackey plays these qualities with the slightly frazzled confidence of a screwball professional, even though the movie talks itself pretty far afield from the genuine screwball delight it could have been. Often, the movie feels like a political comedy from 1946 talking itself down from farce.

Brooks characters talk in circles without necessarily realizing they do; sometimes I’m not even sure if Brooks realizes it. It can make his movies, especially his later-period stuff, seem weirdly uneventful; in the often funny How Do You Know, half the story is predicated on the Paul Rudd character getting in legal trouble that he doesn’t understand and most of the characters refuse to explain to him. Rather than a genuine dilemma, it feels like the movie is stalling for time. Ella McCay also feels like it’s running out the clock, though at least it’s for more thematically appropriate reasons, as a scandal threatens to derail Ella’s governorship before it’s begun. (That’s another reason Brooks must have wanted to jump back to 2008; the notion that this movie’s scandal involving Ella, uh, having sex with her husband could move the needle in any way does not track nearly two decades later. In a weird way, it comes across like Brooks is a bit nostalgic for what used to look like intransigence regarding sex. This may or may not have something to do with a truly bizarre post-coital shot of Ella where she appears to be wearing a scarf or a blanket around her neck.)

But! But!!! The relationship between Ella and her prickly mentor “Governor Bill” retains some of the old-fashioned Brooks good-sitcom zing, and the movie’s take on familial forgiveness has a tartness that most comedy-dramas would never touch. Moreover, this is Mackey’s movie, as she overthinks her way toward making the whole thing feel somewhat less like it was designed by space aliens intent on quietly destroying the reputation of the state Ella was born and raised in. Not for nothing, but I took my ten-year-old daughter to this movie – it was a Christmas-movie compromise (or, per Ella’s preferred terminology, consensus) between her refusal to see Song Sung Blue and my wife’s refusal to see a SpongeBob – and she was able to lock into this talky, apolitically political comedy-drama, with a rootable heroine and some funny moments of relatable neuroses. Families used to see movies like this together all the time, I think! It’s hard to remember. 2008 was a long time ago, much less 1995. I’m not sure where exactly Ella McCay wound up taking me, but I was happy to take the challenge of being whisked away to whatever state it was born and raised in.

How To Watch Ella McCay

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Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Ella McCay on Hulu