Word: priggish
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This is a show whose time has come -and long since gone. After a dazzling movie based on Rodgers1 and Hammerstein's 1951 Broadway musical The King and I, the idea of the irascible but lovable monarch of Siam who is tamed by the priggish but lovable English schoolmarm should be retired with honors and prizes. Instead it is being dragged out week after week as an exotic situation comedy...
...feet firmly planted in the '40s." Maude knows how to arrange all the right-thinking enlightened attitudes around herself, but when she is challenged they open up like gunwales on a galleon, and she blazes away with broadsides at feckless repairmen, greedy cab drivers and her priggish right-wing neighbor...
...even affectionate readers will have a hard time remembering what it is that often makes Auchincloss worth bothering about. The story, written at the level of what used to be called women's magazine fiction, concerns the downfall and upfall of Tony Lowder, a decent, attractive and rather priggish young lawyer with political ambitions. To help a feckless law partner who is in financial trouble, and because there seems no reason not to, Lowder accepts a bribe from a Mafia-connected moneyman whose activities are under investigation. The novel follows the muscular workings of the hero's conscience...
...both persuade the audience that things'll turn out all right with a little assertion of personal rights and a lot of hope. (Both also portray beggars and criminals and lumpenproletariat as lovable urchins, but the political implications of this are so ludicrous that to point them out seems priggish). There is a blight on musical comedy, there has been one for Rodgers knows how long. so why not just admit it and return to the revue...
...usually not annoying to find that a new Heinlein is wrong-headed and somewhat priggish. One simply reads around the didactic parts and soaks in the action and gets caught up in the suspense...