Sridevi’s last great performance anchors a film about a stepmother’s revenge

CBS put Mom on the air on September 23, 2013. The network had a Chuck Lorre comedy and a premise that sounded like a hundred others: a newly sober single mother in Napa, California, raising two kids and trying to stay clean. What CBS did not advertise was that the show would spend eight seasons treating addiction as a fact of life rather than a punchline, and that it would end on May 13, 2021, with 170 episodes behind it.

Mom is a comedy-drama wearing a multi-camera sitcom’s clothes. Created by Lorre, Eddie Gorodetsky and Gemma Baker, it stars Anna Faris as Christy Plunkett and Allison Janney as her mother, Bonnie. The two were estranged for years while both struggled with addiction. The series follows their attempt to pull their lives together by staying sober. That is the whole engine, and it runs the length of the show.

Trailer, via Warner Bros. UK & Ireland.

Christy Plunkett and the AA room

Christy works as a waitress in Napa and attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Her daughter Violet, played by Sadie Calvano, was born when Christy was 17. Violet then becomes pregnant as a teenager; the father is her boyfriend Luke, played by Spencer Daniels. Christy’s young son Roscoe, played by Blake Garrett Rosenthal, comes from her marriage to Baxter, described as a deadbeat but likable pothead. Matt Jones plays Baxter.

Christy eventually goes back to school and pursues law. Bonnie meets and marries a retired stuntman named Adam Janikowski, played by William Fichtner.

The AA room gives the show its second family. Marjorie, the wise one, is played by Mimi Kennedy. Jill, wealthy and materialistic, is played by Jaime Pressly. Wendy, submissive and sometimes overly emotional, is played by Beth Hall. Tammy, loudmouthed but sweet, is played by Kristen Johnston. Collectively they help each other stay sober through the conflicts they face.

The Napa Raiders

Here is a detail worth keeping. Several characters’ last names — Plunkett, Stabler, Janikowski, Biletnikoff, Madden, Hubbard, Casper, Wells, Banaszak — come from former players and coaches of the Oakland Raiders. It is a private joke running underneath a show about people rebuilding their lives, and it says something about how Lorre’s shop works: the writers bury a thing and never explain it.

The casting story is plainer. Faris had guest-starred on television between film projects and been sought for other shows, including an unused NBC pilot called Blue Skies. Mom gave her the first full-time television role of her career, as the lead, in January 2013. Janney came aboard as Christy’s mother on January 28, 2013. Jones and Daniels joined that February, Jones as Christy’s ex-husband Baxter and Daniels as Luke.

Serialized storytelling in a laugh-track room

Mom was filmed in front of a live audience and produced by Chuck Lorre Productions and Warner Bros. Television. That is the standard CBS multi-camera setup, and the show used it. What separated Mom from its neighbors is that it also ran serialized storytelling: overarching storylines continued across multiple episodes and multiple seasons, and past events got referenced later. Characters carried dramatic emotional weight and changed in ways that mattered to the plot.

That combination is harder than it looks. A live audience wants a joke every few seconds. A serialized story wants the audience to remember what happened three seasons ago. Mom asked for both, and mostly got them.

What the show was willing to name

The list of subjects Mom put on screen is long: alcoholism, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, addictive gambling, homelessness, relapse, cancer, death, erectile dysfunction. The show took these seriously enough that it drew acclaim from critics and audiences for the writing and the performances, Janney’s in particular.

That willingness is the show’s real achievement. Plenty of sitcoms have a Very Special Episode. Mom made the difficulty continuous. A relapse was not a sweeps stunt; it was a thing that could happen to a character the audience had spent years with, and the show treated the aftermath as the story rather than the event.

Two shows, one timeslot

The table shows where Mom sat. It kept the format and threw out the reset. That is the trade the show made, and it is why the series reads as a comedy-drama rather than a traditional sitcom.

Eight seasons, one departure

The schedule above is thin because the source material gives exact dates only for the premiere and the finale: September 23, 2013, and May 13, 2021. Eight seasons, 170 episodes. What happened in between is a matter of record elsewhere, and this review will not invent it.

What the record does establish is the shape of the ending. Christy departs, moving to Washington, D.C., and the show shifts to the personal lives of the friends she left behind. That is a real risk for a series built on a mother-daughter pair. Take away one half of the pair and you are running a different show.

Where the show stands

The published critical score is 6.5 out of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 65 out of 100. That number undersells the series in one direction and oversells it in another, and both are worth naming.

It undersells the ambition. A network sitcom that runs eight seasons while keeping addiction, relapse and grief in the foreground, and that does it in front of a live audience without turning the material into a lecture, is not a 6.5 show on nerve alone. Janney’s Bonnie is the performance the show is remembered for, and the reason is that Bonnie never becomes a lesson. She is a woman who did damage, knows it, and keeps doing the work anyway. The show lets her be funny while she does it, which is the harder choice.

It oversells the execution. Serialized storytelling in a multi-camera format costs something, and Mom paid it. Arcs that continue across seasons require the audience to hold a lot in their heads, and the show sometimes reached for emotional weight the episode had not earned. The tonal shifts between a live-audience joke and a scene about a character’s cancer are not always smooth. When the show lands, it lands hard. When it does not, the laugh track sits there, and the gap shows.

The departure of Christy is the clearest example of the cost. The premise was the pair. The show’s own materials describe the back half of the run as delving into the friends Christy left behind, which is an honest description of a series rebuilding its center after losing it.

So: 6.5 out of 10. This is a show that mattered more than its score suggests and stumbled more than its reputation admits. The Raiders names are a nice touch. The AA room is the actual achievement. Eight seasons and 170 episodes is a long time to keep a story about staying sober from becoming a story about being sober, and Mom mostly managed it.

Allison Janney · Anna Faris · Chuck Lorre · Mom CBS · sitcom · TV reviews