I can not disagree with even one word of your three-sentence comment.
I did occasionally watch the One Day at a Time. If I had nothing better to do, I might try to watch it for a few minutes (a) to try to figure out what was the point of it and (b) to rest my eyes on Valerie Bertinelli, whom I saw as a sort of human candyland.
I think that what was creepy about Bonnie Franklin's character - and "creepy" is an excellent word for it - is that she appeared to have left a perfectly fine marriage to a decent man for no reason at all, other than boredom.
No attempt, so far as I am aware, was ever made to justify or even explain why she decided one day to break up her family, take her husband out of her the lives of her daughters and take them out of his life, and go live in a cheap apartment somewhere.
In short, she represented the kind of woman that the musical genre known as "The Blues" was created to describe.
By choosing Joseph Campanella to play her ex-husband, the producers further underlined this concept. Mr. Campanella was usually chosen to play a serious, responsible, fatherly character. If they had chosen someone less likable, the whole thing might have made some of sense.
The message seemed to be that the typical American wife might at any moment just decide that marriage wasn't doing it for her, take the kids, and split. And thanks of no-fault divorce and the feminist movement, not one word of explanation was called for on her part, thank you very much.
Like you, I found that creepy... in a way that my twenty-something mind couldn't really articulate.
The problem is that the set-up of the show didn’t ring true. Now while I could believe a dissolution of the marriage as Franklin’s character was unhappy (having gone right from high school to marriage to a much older man), what was harder to believe is that the two daughters (not that far away from being on their own) would happily agree to leave a stable life in a small town (leaving their friends, etc.) to move to a run-down area of a large city.
I remember when my cousin (about the age of the girls on the show, mid-teens) was forced to uproot from her hometown to a small town in the middle of nowhere (and this with both her parents) and she was absolutely miserable and unhappy for some time.
A realistic portrayal would’ve had the mother drag them off, only to have the girls return to dad and their hometown and normal life VERY quickly. The set-up for the show was better suited for Ann Romano to have been a widow discovering her late husband had frittered away their finances and leaving no life insurance. Of course, one probably shouldn’t put too much effort into critically analyzing sitcoms.
That was the message, that was the period when the media's cultural message was that a women who was married, was unliberated and not part of the movement, she was trapped in old thinking that she needed a man.
That was a period of 50 and 60 year old women leaving their husbands because of social pressure and excitement about solidarity and liberation of women, it was heart breaking for people who were wise enough to know how tragic that was for almost all of those women who succumbed to that message.
It was also during the period of promoting lesbian sex for women, it was a period of total rejection of males and male constructed marriage, etc., etc.
That period seems to have been largely erased from memory, people have no memory of how effective and powerful those movements were, people seem to think of some 1960s stuff, and then today's modern liberalism, and they don't remember the massive destruction during the 1970s when the entire government and institutions, and culture was destroyed and then replaced with something new.