From Lucy Ricardo to Chilli Heeler, Over 50 Years of TV Moms

An examination of TV moms and how they've shaped my views of motherhood

I know that in my last Substack, I mentioned that we watched Being Mary Tyler Moore on HBO Max, and it was very good. It got me to thinking about all the things I loved about Mary and the characters she played. While I loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I also really loved her as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. I was a kid who loved watching Nick-at-Nite as a kid, and black and white family sitcoms were so much fun to me. I didn’t love overly saccharine shows like Ozzie & Harriet or Father Knows Best, but I loved ones that mixed screwball physical comedy with a certain dose of sarcasm. That’s why I loved Dick Van Dyke and my ultimate favorite, I Love Lucy. 

Both of those shows had women who weren’t there to serve as an accessory to the man. Lucy was the star of her show; if anything Desi was the accessory (she is everything, and he’s just Ken personified). She was allowed to be herself: quick-witted, acerbic, emotional and downright hilarious. Laura Petrie was cut from the same cloth as Lucy Ricardo. She loved her husband and son, but she was still her own person. Did you know she was the first TV housewife to wear pants in every episode? Lucy only wore them very occasionally, which fascinated me as a kid. Who the hell would vacuum the house in a dress and pearls? I knew from a young age that I would never be June Cleaver. 

While we watched the documentary, I explained to Beth how much Laura Petrie spoke to me, and it got me thinking about TV and the way it has portrayed women as mothers over the years. I am definitely a product of my generation and watched a lot of TV as a kid. We had cable for much of my childhood, and not only did I get to watch contemporary sitcoms, I got to watch the classic shows that my parents watched growing up. Once I was in my 20s, I didn’t watch as much TV, and then I became a mom myself and my watching habits changed yet again. But there was one thing that was always true: I was attracted to the moms who were sharp and smart and funny and loved their families. They always ruled the roost with a firm hand but a soft heart. I happened upon a collection of articles about TV moms, and I thought: this will make an excellent post on Substack. It’s taken me almost a week to sit down and write it, but here we are.

As a 90s/00s kid, I feel like I was raised in the golden age of the family sitcom when it comes to TV moms. We had more than June Cleaver and Carol Brady, we had Maggie Seaver and Angela Bower and Harriet Winslow. There was no shortage of shows for me to see strong women being modeled, women who worked outside the home and still managed to make dinner and help with homework. My mom was a stay-at-home mom who did things like PTA and volunteered at school, but she didn’t have a regular job other than shuttling me to dancing school several times a week. These women were killing it at work and at home and always managed to look immaculate. (Now that I’m a mom myself, I know this is all TV hocus pocus, but what did little me know?)

Black moms were at their peak on TV in the 80s and 90s. We had gone from Julia to Florida Evans to Clair Huxtable. You can’t talk about TV moms of that generation without talking about Clair Huxtable. I know that the legacy of The Cosby Show is now overshadowed by Bill Cosby’s horrific behavior, but we can’t pretend like the show didn’t exist and didn’t change the landscape of Black representation on television. Clair Huxtable was that bitch. She was the cloth every Black TV mom since has been cut from. She becomes a law partner in season one of the show (it’s one of my favorite episodes), while raising four kids at home and one at college and a hapless husband. Clair was always snatched to the gods (even with a broken toe), cooked, cared for her family and was a pillar of her community. If someone spoke to her out of turn she had a withering glance and a strong comeback.

Without Clair Huxtable, you don’t get the original version of Vivan “Aunt Viv” Banks from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Aunt Viv was also that bitch: a strong Black woman who stood strong in her Blackness, her womanness, and her ability to both be her own person and nurture her family. When Janet Hubert inhabited the role, you could not ignore the power she held. She welcomed her wayward nephew into her home and gave him the moral stability he needed. She also kept her own children as grounded as she possibly could given the world they were living in. Aunt Viv never took the life she and Uncle Phil had cultivated for granted, and she was quick to remind people of that. (I’m reminded of the episode where an old activist friend came to visit and accused them of selling out.) With her youngest child reaching an age of autonomy, Aunt Viv had to figure out who she was again, and the episode where she tried to be a dancer is still one of the best examples of Hubert’s talent. 

When Janet Hubert left the show after a contract dispute, I was devastated. I didn’t watch the show for the hapless hijinks of Will and Carlton. I watched it for Aunt Viv and Hillary. I didn’t like the version of Aunt Viv played by Daphne Maxwell-Reid. They had taken away all of the character’s autonomy and made her subservient to the men in her life. She no longer had a career outside of the home, she was just Phillip’s wife, Carlton, Ashley, Hillary and later Nicky’s mom, and Will’s Aunt. In short, she was boring af when you know where the character started. I have not watched the dramatized version of the show, Bel-Air, but I am curious how Aunt Viv fits into this new generation, no longer a Boomer, but now a Gen-Xer dealing with a whole new set of realities. 

I want to give an honorable mention to Harriet Winslow, who was subjected to a similar fate as the second Aunt Viv, becoming nothing more than an accessory to the hijinks of her husband, son and the annoying boy next door. Another honorable mention to Dee Mitchell, played by the inimitable Sheryl Lee Ralph on Moesha. She was the second wife to a man with two kids and had to learn how to be a mother to a teenage girl and a little boy while working as a principal and dealing with a husband who was a total dick if I’m being honest. And shoutout to Rochelle, the mom on Everybody Hates Chris, who is the perfect amalgamation of a sitcom Black mom and a real life Black mom.

These are the women who gave me examples of what a strong Black woman were, and who I aspired to be when I became a mother myself. They are the women who raised me to know that I could have more than what I was seeing in my own home, not that I think my own mother is lesser than these fictional characters. It’s just that they showed me a different version of what was possible for me as a woman who knew that solely being a wife and mother would not bring me fulfillment from a young age. 

I also briefly want to shout out the white moms of the 80s and 90s who also held it down for me: Elyse Keaton, Maggie Seaver (she was a reporter!) and Angela Bower. Oh! And Jill Taylor. How she dealt with the bullshit toxic masculinity of Tim “The Toolman” Taylor I do not know. But she was a real one. They existed on TV at a time where women were empowered, unlike their late 90s/early 00s counterparts. I could not relate to Debra Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond and her total lack of autonomy. She was portrayed as the shrewish nag of a wife who wouldn’t let her loveable oaf of a husband have any fun and couldn’t seem to put her foot down and tell her in-laws to stay out of her fucking house without permission. 

The early 90s also ushered in an interesting trend: the anti-Clair. Characters like Marge Simpson, Peg Bundy and Roseanne Conner popped up to provide an antidote to the upper middle class example set by Clair Huxtable and the women I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Peg and Roseanne and Marge were crass, cranky and generally useless as wives and mothers. I didn’t watch much of Married with Children or Roseanne until I was an adult, and while I understand their existence and necessity, I just can’t find them entertaining. I truly believe that Roseanne Conner was a narcissist, which made her hard for me to connect with and love. But a lot of white women saw themselves in her, and for that, I understand her place in the cannon. I cannot understand the point of Married with Children other than to be a subversive, white trash antidote to the “perfectionism” of family life portrayed on TV. But it’s not even subversive in a fun John Waters Pink Flamingos kind of way. It’s just crass and in bad taste. Call me a snob if you must. 

When I became a mom in 2013, I gave a lot of thought to what TV had told me about motherhood. I thought back to the moms that raised me, but I also thought about the TV moms who were supposed to be reflecting the world I was mothering in. Two stick out in particular: Rainbow Johnson from black-ish and Claire Dunphy from Modern Family. It could be because those were the two shows I watched most consistently during my early days as a mom, but I think they were ushering in a new version of the TV mom. Claire starts the show as a stay-at-home mom, which is practically unheard of nowadays. She is not a kept woman, but she reminds me of my own mom when I was growing up, except my mother was nowhere near as neurotic as Claire. Bow felt more like the Black moms I had grown up with, but she was much more honest about the hard parts of motherhood. I also suffered from postpartum depression, and it was refreshing to see the topic tackled on a sitcom. 

For the first six years of my son’s life, I raised him as a single mother. Yes, we lived with my parents, but it was all me all the time when it came to child rearing. When I became a mom, the only strong example of single motherhood I had on TV was Lorelai Gilmore. Gilmore Girls premiered when I was in high school, and over those seven seasons, it was one of the few shows my whole family would watch together. Lorelai was an idealized version of single motherhood in a world that never truly acknowledged the amount of privilege she possessed. Viewers weren’t privy to the “struggle” she dealt with as a young mom with a baby — we know she walked into the inn where she still worked as a young single mom and was offered a job by the kind owner and never looked back. Thinking about that show now, it is so infuriating because it never confronts or even mentions the immense privilege Lorelai had being a young white woman who had come from money and lived in a small town in Connecticut. She found a literal village of people to help her raise her daughter, and then her own parents came back into the picture, offering to pay for her daughter’s education! 

TV still has a long way to go when it comes to portraying a more realistic version of single motherhood, but one show I think got closer to the reality of single motherhood as I know it was Better Things. Sam Fox, played by Pamela Adlon, is a working actor who owns a house to raise her three daughters in, but the struggles she deals with feel a lot more realistic than anything I can remember Lorelai Gilmore dealing with. Beth introduced me to the show because she interviewed Pamela for her documentary, and we spent a lot of time bingeing the show. Was I often driven insane by the way Sam would allow her children to talk to her? Absolutely. But I attributed that to the fact that she was white and I was raised to have some goddamn sense. I would also like to shout out Nalini Vishwakumar from Never Have I Ever. Again, she’s very clearly comfortably middle class, but the emotional beats, especially when it comes to the loneliness of single motherhood and navigating dating again felt very real. 

I think we’re making really good progress with overall depictions of how motherhood is evolving on television. Radical honesty about the struggles mothers face is starting to become part of the fabric of talking about motherhood, and that is certainly extending to TV. Even children’s television is starting to get in on the shift! I watched a lot of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood when my son was a toddler and preschooler, and one of the things that drove me nuts was how seemingly perfect those moms were. I refused to believe that Mom Tiger (who didn’t even have a first name!) really had an endless well of patience and didn’t get annoyed at Daniel sometimes. I would have loved to see a scene between her and her husband where she talked about how annoying potty training was or something. We got a little of that on Fancy Nancy, which I appreciated. But I think it’s clear that Nancy’s mom is a millennial (she wears plaid and glasses) and she’s out here trying to break generational curses.

All of my mom friends with toddlers praise the Australian show Bluey for many reasons, one of them being how they depict Bluey’s mom Chilli Heeler. Again, she’s a millennial mom, and I think many of us feel a kinship with her. Bluey came to the States just as my son was transitioning out of watching shows made for preschoolers regularly. There are a few episodes he loves, and I was struck by how much I loved Chilli and her radical honesty. She feels like one of my friends, even though she’s an animated dog. So often, the writers of children’s television focus so much on pleasing the tiny folks watching TV that they forget about the adults who are also being forced to watch the show repeatedly. Bluey is a really good antidote to that feeling.

As a mom in a same-sex relationship, there are not a lot of families on TV that look like ours. One of the most famous two mom families is probably Callie and Arizona from Grey’s Anatomy, but we don’t get to see a lot of their family outside of the confines of the hospital. There are also Stef and Lena on The Fosters, but it’s also a show where the moms are not the main focal point of the show. We do get to see more of their day-to-day life and an examination of their life as a couple and as parents, but so often it is through the lens of their children. The occasional two mom family will pop up on shows like Sex Education or even Peppa Pig, but I’m holding out hope that one day we will get a sitcom where two moms are the leads and anchors of the family. 

What are some things you’ve observed about motherhood on television? How have they influenced what you think about motherhood? I’m dying to know.