Oh Momma: Mother figures are in vogue this new TV season
Thursday, September 30, 2004
By Jill Vejnoska
COX NEWS SERVICE
Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry was watching TV with his mother
one night a few years ago when a news report came on about the Andrea Yates
case. After several minutes spent absorbing the latest tragic twists and
turns in the saga of the woman who drowned five of her children in a bathtub,
Cherry recalled, "I said, 'Gosh, can you imagine a woman being so
desperate that she would hurt her own children?'"
Said Martha Cherry, removing the cigarette from her mouth: "I've been
there."
Oh, yeah? Well, where's television been all this time?
Not giving us a full picture of motherhood, that's where. Although one look
at Desperate Housewives (which makes its debut Sunday on ABC) and the rest
of the fall TV schedule suggests that's all about to change.
We've suddenly hit the mother lode of interesting mom characters, thanks to
a convergence of current events, a newfound willingness to look at women's
complex, sometimes conflicted roles as nurturing caregivers, and the recent
success of several shows that have fleshed out the standard parent roles.
Marc Cherry's conversion began that night when his mother finally discussed
her lonely, often frustrating (but not homicidal) years raising three kids,
and he suddenly realized that "every woman" must have similar
feelings at times.
Listening to the actresses or creators behind this fall's other notable moms
almost giddily equate them with Tony Soprano, Scarlett O'Hara - even Stalin,
in the case of Jessica Walter as the hilariously manipulative Lucille on Fox's
Emmy-winning comedy Arrested Development - it's clear that mothers are the new
black this season. That is, in vogue, indispensable and definitely not boring.
"It's kind of in the zeitgeist now," said Thomas Schlamme about the
current focus on moms in such series as the WB's Jack & Bobby, of which he is
the executive producer and where his real-life wife, Oscar-winner Christine
Lahti, plays a mother more powerful and unpredictable than Mother Nature herself.
"I think we're all interested in complicated characters on TV."
Complicated - and almost too numerous to count - are this fall's slate of mothers,
whether the genre is reality (only moms need apply to be on ABC's Wife Swap),
scripted drama or sitcom.
"It's such a pleasure to play a more dimensional adult," said Lisa
Darr, who is a mother with a life as complicated and secretive in some ways as
her teen-age son's on ABC's life as we know it. "The last show that I did
where I was the mom ... it was, you know, 'You kids be home by 11.'"
Even when Mom is not around this fall, she - and her attendant drama - still
linger. On the new ABC sitcom Complete Savages, five boys and their dad
(Keith Carradine) are forced to cope when mom suddenly up and abandons them.
"Marriages fail for all sorts of reasons," says executive producer
Mike Scully, explaining that until now, it has usually been the dad who
leaves on TV. "Sometimes Mom doesn't like being wife and mom."
Whatever, she isn't just wearing pearls and passing plates of homemade
cookies to Bud and Kitten anymore.
"Does she have to change who she is in order to keep her husband?"
asked Sela Ward, the star of CBS' Suburban Madness, a true-crime movie
airing Sunday about a dentist and mother of young twins who fatally ran
over her husband who'd strayed - apparently because he found her too nurturing.
"How far does a woman have to go to lose all of her self-esteem and
self-respect?"
How in the name of June Cleaver did we ever get here? Here from Laura
Petrie, Donna Stone, Marion Cunningham or any of the other "classic"
mom types who dominated TV from the late '50s to the early '80s, rarely
venturing into the working world and never letting 'em see her sweat or
become resentful as she kept the home running smoothly?
It all added up to a case of art not imitating life, according to Felicity
Huffman, whose Desperate Housewives character willingly traded in a
high-powered corporate career for motherhood on a bucolic suburban
cul-de-sac. Four boisterous kids later, she's chasing them down at a
fellow mom's memorial service (a suicide victim - she had her own issues)
and more quietly wrestling with questions about how she ended up at this
place in life and where she possibly goes next.
In other words, TV is finally catching up with the real world.
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