The death of Florence Henderson draws the curtain a little further on the Good Old Days of television Moms.
But if you peek behind that curtain, things might not be quite as different as they sometimes seem.
No one who has watched television for more than five minutes over the last 20 years, of course, is surprised that the bright, sunny, fair, wise and ever-cheerful Moms of yore are as rare today as getting a live representative when you call customer service.
Carol Brady in The Brady Bunch was one of the last of a breed that dated back to June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsly, right) Harriet Nelson and the TV Moms of the 1950s. They baked cookies, supported their sometimes misguided hubbies and always knew exactly what to say and when to say it.
Soon after Carol ended her six-year run in 1974, we were already starting to get more TV Moms like the well-meaning but ditsy Edith Bunker on All in the Family.
Fifteen years later we had Roseanne Conner, (Roseanne Barr, below) whose mothering skills were reflected in one famous scene where she takes a swig of milk from a carton in the refrigerator, spits it out because it’s gone bad, and puts the carton back in the fridge.
Today’s poster woman for marginal mothering is probably Allison Janney’s Bonnie Plunkett on Mom. Her advice is often as questionable as her penchant for competing with her daughter in matters of entertainment and romance.
Nor is Bonnie the only TV Mom who’s looking to recapture her youth through her daughter. Look no further than Lisa Vidal’s Daisie Villa, mother of Jaina Lee Ortiz’a Annalise Villa on Rosewood.
No, you don’t have to click very far into your 900 channels these days to find a Mom who gives her kids a high probability of spending a lifetime in therapy.
Keri Russell’s Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans has raised her kids without ever telling them she and their Dad are Soviet spies.
Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie Lyon on Empire spent 17 years in prison and is fond of playing her kids and ex-husband off against each other.
Michelle Dockery’s Letty Raines on Good Behavior has also done prison time and remains a thief and junkie as she tries to regain custody of her son. Great case she’s building there, y’know?
And that’s even before we get to teen and tween shows, where the best Mom can hope for on shows like Faking It or Awkward is to be well-meaning and usually clueless.
The ideal Moms may have been the ones on the late iCarly, a teenage world in which Moms were never seen.
All this said, however, there may not be quite as much of a disconnect as it seems between Carol Brady and Bonnie Plunkett or Cookie Lyon.
Contemporary TV Moms still want to be Carol Brady and June Cleaver. They may not have as much time to bake cookies, because that’s not something Moms do so much anymore, but they desperately want their children to turn out happy and well – and to play a central role in shaping that success.
With few exceptions they want to say all the right things, be a rock of compassion, offer unconditional comfort in times of crisis.
Their only mistake was being born at the wrong time.
We live in a different real-life era today, an era when virtually all relationships, including those between parents and children, are worn much more prominently on our sleeves.
A world increasingly defined and at times dominated by social media, which geometrically increases everything that lands on top of children, isn’t a world that can be addressed in the comparatively neat and controlled way Carol and June used to do it.
The world is just more complicated, and the role of Mom reflects that. You look at the Moms in shows like Modern Family (Julie Bowen, right), Black-ish or The Middle, and they’re totally on board with Carol Brady. They’re just dealing with more nuances and that means along the way they will probably take more missteps.
Also, as TV in general has become less fanciful and a bit darker, writers and producers are acknowledging that there are many mothers whose own serious problems inevitably color their relationships with their children, and not always in a good way.
Agent Elizabeth Keen on The Blacklist would love to be Carol Brady. She’s just on the run with mysterious men trying to manipulate her and sometimes kill her. That cuts into knitting time.
Florence Henderson’s death saddened millions of TV viewers both over Henderson herself and the beloved TV Mom she created. Much of the world measures their own Moms against the standards of a Carol Brady.
Somewhere she can be pleased that even if we see fewer literal incarnations of Carol on TV today, those standards remain sturdy and revered.