The Italians
Cristin Milioti and me, we have made it
More than a decade ago I was infatuated with Cristin Milioti, who was chosen to play the eponymous The Mother in the final season of How I Met Your Mother. Playing Scoth-Irish Tracy McConnell, she became the darling of the network TV, the one that Ted and the audience are waiting for. We got to know the selfishness and screwups of the other main characters over the years, but not the angelic Tracy.
Therefore, a dark theory emerged that she was too good for this world, suggesting that The Mother might have died at the beginning of the story. After all, it’s more logical for the whole series about Ted and Robin instead of Ted and the character that just showed up in the final season, with lower star recognition and salary than Cobie Smulders and Alyson Hannigan.
Knowing this grim conclusion was in place, I avoided the last episodes of the series and the scream over the Internet was loud enough for me in March 2014. Fans and even casual audiences couldn’t accept how The Mother was killed by an unspecified illness. After all, a sitcom is not expected to kill a character for the finale, especially a very good woman identified as “The Mother”. Edgier critics praised HIMYM for pushing boundaries in what a sitcom can and cannot do, if only in redefining “kill for your love” – The Mother dies so that Ted and Robin can be together.
It was enough to make 2014 a gloomy year for me. We had Tracy only for her to be killed. I had a promotion offer only to lose my job without any notice. I took a train ride across Java to the eastern port of Surabaya, sitting across two German backpackers and a Canadian family whose daughter resembled Cobie Smulders.
Months later, I watched Cristin Milioti’s pre-HIMYM movies and TV appearances and eventually published clips of her dialogues on my YouTube. Her characters and real personalities reminded me why I had liked brown-haired American white girls since puberty: The spunk. The wits. The confidence. The non-sequitur. Manic pixie dream girl? Yeah.
Milioti famously described herself as “Olive Garden Italian”, an Americanized one. Over her career, she’s played Irish, Italian, English, and even Nordic (Betty Solverson, nee Larsson in Fargo) characters, as well as a secretly Jewish – Abby Grossman who pretends to be Abby Flynn in 30 Rock.
The dark-haired American starlets I liked were Jewish (Winona Ryder and Natalie Portman) and Italian (Christina Ricci, Alyssa Milano, and yes, Liv Tyler). When I was about to go to Australia, I thought it would be easy to date an Irish or Italian Australian girl – we’re fellow Catholics!
And no, I didn’t find any Italian Australian girl who went to a Catholic Mass. One quick thing I learned about the difference between Italians and Greeks was how assimilated Italians were by the early 2000s. Yes, they had the accent and the given names, but they didn’t care about the Italian language and the Catholic church. The Greeks, meanwhile, were still sent to Sunday schools where they learned Greek and the Eastern Orthodox faith.
Like Italian Americans, Italian Australians were also in the middle position in the early 2000s, and The Sopranos was a good barometer. Were they unjustly labeled as criminals and eternal foreigners? Was The Sopranos a good representation of Italians, considering Australian television is still a largely blonde, Anglo-Celtic space? What’s the difference between The Sopranos with all other Mafia stuff, apart from now the gangsters wearing polos and bowling shirts instead of suits?
The Sopranos was also played in real-time in Melbourne, as gangland wars involving Italians and Irish took place in the 2000s, with news of bodies found every weekend morning, and by 2004 Melbourne had taken over Sydney as the murder capital of Australia. But like in America, no one blamed the Italians for being violent minorities. They had been established as pro athletes, TV panelists, celebrity chefs, and journalists. Italian cafes and restaurants had become bourgeois Australian establishments by the 1980s.
Throughout my six years in Australia, I only knew two Jewish Australians: My professor Robert Manne (father of Kate) and my final landlord, an Orthodox man who wore the same white shirt and black pants every day, with the kippah and glasses and beard, and we got along with our sour sensibilities. There was also a girl in university who ignored me even though I didn’t do anything wrong, she looked like Nana Mouskouri and could be anyone – an Italian, a Greek, a Lebanese, or a Jew.
Antisemitism in Melbourne in 2024 shows the fraction between the poor north and the wealthier south – I went to La Trobe in the north and apart from Robert Manne, made friends with Italian and Irish lecturers and Indian, Irish, Vietnamese, Filipina, and Croatian students. All Catholics, but the love still didn’t happen (with the students, of course, while an Italian professor served as an agony aunt for a while).
Always thinking what if I chose the more prestige and more expensive Monash, named after Australia’s most famous military leader and Jew (an opposite of Dreyfus, really), I would have met Melbourne’s copies of Natalie Portmans. But you know, I wanted a Catholic romance.
This difference between Italians and Jews was on my mind while watching Seinfeld and Golden Girls. These sitcoms influence how the world sees America and its cultural groups. The world knows that George has the surname Constanza, so he’s Italian. His neuroticism, selfishness, and baldness, all proxies of Larry David, well, could happen to anyone, including an Italian.
The same goes with Sophia Petrillo, played by Jewish American Estelle Getty. Mrs. Petrillo always talks about the old country of Sicily. Impossible to think that she’s a secret Jew (not as she’s actually a Sicilian Jew, but written as a Jewish matron in mind), since not only does she always talk about Sicily, but she’s a great cook. Italian home cooking, anyone?
Mediterranean Americans got the spotlight in the late 1960s. Lebanese like Peter Lupus and Marlo Thomas, Greeks like Telly Savalas, Jews like Allen and Streisand, and Italians like Newman and Pacino (naturally the world and younger Americans thought Marlon Brando was Italian too). More cynical critics thought the WASPs embraced them to stand up for African Americans, but those were also the days when black Americans got the spotlights as well.
The image of Italian American men as mafia went together with their image as the lovable fools, from Tony Danza’s characters to Joey Tribianni in Friends, played by French American Matt LeBlanc, who’s stuck with the character throughout his life. As usual, the women have worse characterization, from the wife on the edge (Talia Shire and Edie Falco’s characters) to the tramp (Drea de Matteo and obviously, Madonna). Jewish actresses have also played less-than-ideal Italian characters, such as Jamie-Lynn Sigler playing Meadow Soprano and Rachel Chagall playing Val Toriello in The Nanny.
Finally, my cyber-suburbia which is my X. I’ve followed many Jewish American writers since they had other ideas about Democrat politics in the early 2020s, and they happened to be good sports on X and followed me back. I think I’ve dialed back my philosemitism lately while thinking “Again, where are the Italians?”
I guess there are some Jewish or anonymous mutuals with Italian heritage as well, and that is where the original points stand. Nobody questions their Italian heritage this century. Nobody talks about “Italians of color” in American journalism. As the jokes go, nobody blames the Roman Empire for all the slavery and genocide.
Eventually yes, some people identifying as Italian have followed me back, with different degrees of Catholic faith. Just like myself, really. And as expected, they throw in fewer Italian words than the Jews do with Yiddish or Hebrew.
We’ve completed the circle. Cristin Milioti has achieved more fame as the leading actress of The Penguin, playing an Italian American character, and that’s why my YouTube videos get new comments and likes. I am no longer fixated on her or any other celebrity, as talking daily with American women is no longer a dream but a reality.