Midge Maisel's father on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel / WED 11-18-20 / Adkins for Adele / Betting game in which you could lose your shirt / Time away from the grind for short / 1974 pop hit with Spanish lyrics / Farm-share program, for short

Constructor: Amanda Rafkin and Ross Trudeau

Relative difficulty: Medium, maybe Medium+ because of the rebus element

THEME: TWO PEAS IN A POD (34A: Almost twins ... as suggested by this puzzle's circled squares?) — circled squares contain two "P"s:

Theme answers:

• STRIPPOKER / COPPERTOP
• WRAPPARTY / "I'M HAPPY"
• VIP PASSES / WHOPPER, JR.
• FLIPPHONES / APPLE

Word of the Day: "ERES TU" (48D: 1974 pop hit with Spanish lyrics) —

"Eres tú" (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈeɾes ˈtu], "It's You") is a popular Spanish language song written in 1973 by Juan Carlos Calderón and performed by the Spanish band Mocedades, with Amaya Uranga performing the lead vocal.

It was chosen as Spain's entry in the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest. After reaching second place in the contest, it was released as a single.

This song also has an English version entitled "Touch the Wind" with lyrics by Mike Hawker.

This song also has an Indonesian version entitled "Hatiku" ("My Heart") with gospel lyrics used in Catholic mass. (wikipedia)

• • •

The revealer is fine, but it turns out just putting two "PP"s into squares just isn't that fun. It's a one-note gimmick, and while some of the "PP"-containing answers, like FLIP PHONES, are interesting in their own right, for the most part solving this puzzle just involved a programmatic placement of "P"s in their proper positions.Once you get the trick, it's paint by numbers, fill-in-the-blanks. There's plenty of theme action, technically, but none of it really *feels* like theme action. So you get essentially nine "theme" answers (if you include the revealer), but not nearly that much theme impact. Which means that all that theme material severely undermines your ability to fill the grid well / smoothly, while delivering very little in the way of thematic payoff. Actually, considering how badly the theme material taxes the grid, it's surprising the fill is as smooth as it is. Aside from "ERES TU" (which ... honestly, feel free to delete that bit of ancient crosswordese from your word list annnnny time) and the nobody-wins dilemma of OVOID-or-OVATE at 21A: Shaped like grapes, there isn't too much irksome in the grid ***except*** in the NW, which is kind of a disaster (and, not coincidentally, where I had the most trouble). Let's start with this, because it's the most important issue:

3D: Sign in an apartment window (TO RENT)

No fooling, if you do a google image search of ["to rent" sign] you just get picture after picture of "FOR RENT" signs. TORENT looks like you misspelled "torrent." You have to respect the way language actually works, and not call your lawyer in to try to justify the way you want it to work. It makes everything bad when you do this. THE NETS also makes everything bad, the way most definite articles in sports teams names do (for more badness, see the unsayable and improbably singular NYJET). There is literally nothing to clue the "OH" part of "OH, THAT" (2D: Words following "Which thing?"), which makes that answer, oh, awful. 

You also probably shouldn't cross the exclamation "OH" with the exclamation "OHO!" Oh, no, you should not. I wanted ROT at 1A: Go bad, and I should've followed that feeling, but then I saw that DAISES / AHA worked at 1D: Platforms for speakers / 14A: "Well, looky here!," so I put those answers in and took ROT out, thus ruining three answers in one fell swoop, woo hoo! I can accept RANDR as an answer if you can accept that no one ever really likes to see it, so throwing it into this already heavily compromised corner feels punitive. OK, that's all. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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