A recent survey named Claire Huxtable as TV's best sitcom mom. Mrs. C, from "Happy Days", was second with Marge Simpson, voiced by MTM alum Julie Kavner coming in third.Claire Huxtable was the tough but fair-minded matriarch of "The Cosby Show", who approached her family with the same tenacity as her career. A successful lawyer and a mother of five children, she was quite a woman. Of course, it helps when you're not real, and you're problems are always wrapped up in twenty-two minutes.
ANYWAY, I'm not surprised to find Claire on this list, but, seeing as I am somewhat of an authority on the subject, I'd like to put in a word for a few under-appreciated TV moms.
Alice Hyatt was a single mom of a young teenaged son who moved from New Jersey and headed west when her husband died. Although her goal was always to make it big as a singer, she found herself at Mel's Diner, serving up ham and eggs along with a healthy dose of sass and motherly wisdom. The Diner was peppered with interesting characters, from Mel himself, a native of Brooklyn and former Navy frycook to Flo, a back-talking, man hungry southern belle who was always ready to tell a rowdy customer or (usually) Mel to "Kiss my grits." Alice was smart, funny and warm. You know, alot like the waitresses at the Bel-Loc.
Another TV mom we don't hear much about, and who also happens to be a single mom, is Ann Romano who lived with her two teenaged daughters in a high-rise apartment in Indianapolis on the show "One Day at a Time." Unlike Alice, Romano was divorced (the first divorced mom on TV, I believe) from her husband (who would later be revealed to be an alcoholic, something found out by the girls when they run in to him, utterly stinko, in a neighborhood bar) and the show was a nitty-gritty look at the trials and tribulations of raising teenaged daughters, one of whom was a stonecold fox (Valerie Bertinelli) and one of whom was probably half-coked out of her mind the entire time (Mackenzie Phillips). Romano (who used her maiden name, while her girls stuck with their father's name, Cooper) was always juggling her job and her girls all the while fending off the adorably insufferable Schneider, handy man extraordinaire, and attempting to rebuild her own life.
But the best mother in all of TV-dom, by far, has got to be that wrinkly smart-ass Sophia Patrillo from NBC's hit sitcom "The Golden Girls." Sophia, who hailed from New York by way of Sicily, was a caustic, witty, back-talking grandmother who wasn't above an occasional romp in the orthopedic hay. (She wanted to get in good with St. Peter, but she didn't want his job.) She loved each Golden Girl like they were her own, while never missing the opportunity to call Rose an idiot, Blanche a slut or reminding her daughter, Dorothy, that she never would have had to marry that yutz (novelty salesman and all around schlub Stanley Zbornak) if she hadn't let him knock her up.
There are a number of other worthy mothers who deserve mention in this post, from "The Wonder Years'" Norma Arnold, who brought her own brand of feminism into the Arnold house by defiantly going to work in the late-sixties, to Danny Tanner, who held his family together with enough hugs, empathy and sappy music to give Suzanne Sugarbaker a toothache.
So here's to mothers, both real and otherwise. They'll make your dinner and they'll make you crazy and for thirty minutes each weeknight, you can always count on them to make you laugh.
Tony
