‘Call Me Kat’: Mayim Bialik on That ‘Blossom’ Reunion, Kat’s Feelings for Max & More
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Call Me Kat Season 2 finale “Call Me Shellfish.”]
Following what ends up being a panic attack that lands Kat (Mayim Bialik) in the hospital, she decides it’s time to make a major decision: close the cat café.
Following a dream in which she shares a conversation with her late father (Ted Wass, who played Bialik’s father on Blossom), Kat admits to her friends and mother that she needs a break. They’re supportive, but Randi (Kyla Pratt) and Phil (Leslie Jordan) also surprise her by later revealing they’ll keep the café open while she’s gone. So where is she going? She spends some time in Paris, and while the real Max (Cheyenne Jackson) may not join her on the balcony in robes, “who knows?” Kat wonders.
Bialik breaks down the Season 2 finale and what could be next. (The comedy has yet to be renewed for a third season.)
Talk about Kat’s decision to get away. Does she need distance not just from the cat café but also from the people in her life to figure out what she wants to do next?
Mayim Bialik: Yeah, I think Kat is having a total breakdown. All of the things that have been secure for her have started falling away and even the overwhelm regarding Oscar [Christopher Rivas] proposing and all of the potential confusion and feelings that she might still be having for Max played into that. And the Nick [Andy Favreau] of it, as I’ve been calling it, has only confused things more and placed an amount of pressure on her both financially and also kind of emotionally that leads her to need to get away.
Lisa Rose/FOX
Clearly Kat’s not over Max, but how does she feel about him at the end of Season 2? Does she know?
I think there’s a lot of not knowing and that’s the space that we’re trying to be comfortable with Kat living in. There is a lot of not knowing and I think many of us can relate to that, especially the unmarried women around 40. There’s a lot of not knowing, there’s a lot of choices kind of constantly to be made. And Kat is at the juncture of a lot of those. So I think when it comes to Max, it’s an added part of the confusion that she doesn’t know. And as a lot of people say, when you don’t know, you don’t know, and indeed she’s still figuring many things out.
Talk about that dream Kat had of her father. Was he — or a version of him in her head, at least — the only person she could be honest with like that to arrive at the decision she needed to about the café?
Obviously having Ted Wass from my Blossom days do this cameo for us was really, really special. And I think that so much of Kat’s motivation, which we explore in the therapy scene, is about the lessons that she learned from her father and kind of the legacy that she feels he passed on to her. So I think it’s a really sweet connection to have, and also a real nod to kind of the way the show started, meaning this notion of, we have this character who we don’t really know, but we know her father died and it’s set in motion all of these things. So it felt like a really sweet way to kind of put a cap on Season 2 to kind of revisit the basis for a lot of her decisions about opening the cafe and why she did that.
Lisa Rose/FOX
Even though there’s all the uncertainty and Kat’s now going with the flow, how does she feel about her life now compared to when we met her at the beginning of the series? How has she changed the most?
It’s been two years of a lot of change for our Kat. Obviously she got to have a long-term relationship, the longest that she’s had, which is really special, and lo and behold, that was not everything that she thought it would be. It didn’t do all the things that maybe she thought it would do for her. And so in a lot of ways, she’s a little bit back where she started, but as I like to remind myself, we’re never back exactly where we started. We do this kind of spiraling up, so she has a lot more experience, a lot more insight and a lot more perspective than she did at the beginning.
If there is a Season 3, what can you tease about where it might find Kat — in terms of her career and love life — after she took that time away?
I have no idea because the big “if” is still an issue for me today. We don’t know if there’s gonna be a Season 3 and it’s really gonna be up to our writers to decide where she’s gonna go. I can see her ending up a lot of places. I can see her finding a new version of herself. I could see her making changes. I really don’t know, and it’s exciting. And obviously not knowing if there’s a Season 3 makes it even more of an unknown. But we hope we all get to find out where Kat ends up.
