TV Eye
And Then There Was Maude
By Belinda Acosta, Fri., May 1, 2009
When Bea Arthur died last week, a response appeared on Facebook and the Twitter-verse instantly. An amazing thing since Arthur hasn't been a regular fixture on network TV for decades.
She had a career many actors dream of. Starting in live theatre, she gained a larger audience when she guest starred on All in the Family. That appearance earned her a spin-off series in 1972 as the title character in Maude, which ran for six seasons. Arthur made a couple of films and later starred in another hit TV series that now has a cult following, The Golden Girls. (She continued to do stints on sitcoms throughout the Aughties and was Emmy-nominated for her guest turn on Malcolm in the Middle in 2000.) After the news of Arthur's passing, a friend of mine posted the opening sequence for Maude on Facebook, pointing out how great Donny Hathaway's theme song for the series is. But as I was watching it, I was struck: Where, on contemporary TV, would you see a graying, "handsome" woman, with thick eyebrows and a less-than-girlish figure, who had something to talk about beyond an insular obsession with her personal life? A woman who actually had something to say about the world through her small piece of the planet? I thought of what was and is out there, now and in the recent past:
Kathryn Joosten's Mrs. McCluskey on Desperate Housewives: Sure, she issued some great zingers at the expense of Nicollette Sheridan's Edie Britt, but compared to the other women on Wisteria Lane, she was a joke. Joosten came to Housewives following her more distinguished role as Mrs. Landingham, President Bartlet's longtime secretary on The West Wing. That she was killed by a drunken driver made for great drama on and off the screen. After appearing in only 30 episodes, Mrs. Landingham was so loved by fans that the uproar over her death was loud and emotional. It caught the creators off guard, too, but the damage was done. Not even the writing wizardry of Aaron Sorkin could bring Mrs. Landingham back from the dead (save for the occasional flashback, of course).
Susan Sullivan on Castle and Holland Taylor on Two and a Half Men: Both play accomplished women and the mothers of adult men on their respective shows. As mothers, they're flawed – too flighty, too self-centered, too, well, pretty to be "real" mothers.
Cristine Rose as Angela Petrelli on Heroes: She's the antithesis to the flighty mother, this one being conniving and again, not really a "good" mother because she spends too much time with all that keeping-the-secret-of-the-heroes-and-their-powers business. When she led her children on the creepy camping trip to dig up corpses, yeah, I pretty much called it quits. Yes, I realize others tuned out long ago, but I liked Angela, hoping that putting the show in her lap would steer it in an interesting direction. Alas, the creators don't seem to know what to do with a powerful, complicated woman like Angela Petrelli – or the rest of the cast, from what it now seems.
Sally Field as perky matriarch Nora Walker on Brothers & Sisters: As the übermom of the lot, Field deserves a lot of credit for making an overbearing mother tolerable. However, earlier in the series, Nora had a strong, progressive streak, making for some spirited discussions between her and her conservative daughter, Kitty (Calista Flockhart). While I still watch the somewhat windswept machinations of the whitest Mexican family on TV (more on that another time), it frustrates me that Nora has, over time, become mostly defined by baking cookies, hosting large family dinners, and meddling in her adult children's lives. Even her project to launch a Ronald McDonald-like facility has been shunted to the background so she can nest in her enormous home and fold her estranged son's laundry. Sigh.
Are there others? I can't think of any.
It's not that I have anything against the young and the lovely, but with Bea Arthur's passing, it's clear that what we're seeing on the aging end of the spectrum, especially aging women on TV, is narrow. While there was that initial sorrow at Arthur's passing from cancer at age 86, the grand dame had a great career. Let's hope the grandness, the vitality, and the backbone of the characters she embodied did not die with her.
As always, stay tuned.
