Even in a network television world that tends to reward mediocrity, the announcement that NBC is renewing “The Mommies” as a midseason replacement is really pushing the envelope.
That isn’t how it’s supposed to turn out for television shows that are savagely panned and monumentally ignored.
“The Mommies” was a classic case of a sitcom that didn’t work. Its leads, Marilyn Kentz and Caryl Kristensen were homemakers-turned-comedians-turned actresses who froze in the glare of the kleig-lights just like a couple of deer.
They already had been relegated to television Siberia on Saturday nights, where they waited to die quietly and ingloriously amid deafening cries of “good riddance.”
“The Mommies” ended its first season with a paltry 13 percent share of the viewing audience in its time period and a pathetic 106th place finish out of 133 prime-time shows rated by the A.C. Nielsen Co.
“We just sort of kissed it off as a learning year,” said Kentz, 46. “We reassured ourselves that, hey, Tom Hanks did `Bosom Buddies.’ That became our mantra. But it still put me right into therapy.”
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Nielsen graveyard: A couple of weeks after NBC announced its fall schedule and “The Mommies” wasn’t on it, the network almost sheepishly revealed that the show would indeed be back with 13 more episodes.
Shock. Outrage. Befuddlement. And that was just from the critics.
Imagine what Kentz and Kristensen felt.
“Yes, I would say we were surprised,” recalled Kristensen, 33.
“Let’s just say it certainly wasn’t our decision,” Kentz added.
But make no mistake, the women are pleased by this sudden and inexplicable second chance at sitcom life.
“To have another shot to go back and improve on it is wonderful,” Kristensen said. “How many people get that chance?”
Not many, certainly. Not with the kind of ratings they had.
Yet it isn’t as if Kentz and Kristensen were just sitting on their admittedly padded duffs feeling sorry for themselves. While the fate of “The Mommies” was being decided, they went out on a 20-city “Mommies” road show and played to packed arenas of women. Even they admit that this is the kind of stuff they do best.
“We relate to women because we tell the truth about our own lives and our own bodies,” Kentz said. “Women look at us and see themselves, and they say, `I had no idea my life was that funny.’ “
Kristensen puts it more succinctly.
“Our live shows are for women who only want sex once a month,” she said, “kind of like Marilyn and I.”
It was this same self-deprecating sense of everywoman that in 1990 inspired Kristensen and Kentz-both homemakers and neighbors in the Northern California community of Petaluma to join forces as stand-up comedians and joke about their longtime marriages, their humdrum suburban lives and their less than perfect bodies.
“We’d ask the mothers who attended to bring slides of their children, and in the middle of the show we’d play the Joe Cocker song `You Are So Beautiful’ while we played these slides,” Kentz recalled. “You’d have all these weeping mothers-and then we’d have to go back to being funny.”
“We didn’t really know much about pacing,” Kristensen added, in obvious understatement.
But these mommies worked on it and improved enough to interest NBC in putting them into their own situation comedy based on their act.
Unfortunately, things didn’t translate well from the stage to the small screen. “The Mommies” was vindictively pummeled by the critical community as a lame “Roseanne” knockoff at best and-at worst-a laughless piece of garbage.
Kentz and Kristensen prefer to think of the brickbats as something of an exaggeration.
“There was clearly an agenda in some of those reviews,” Kristensen said. “I’ll tell you, to put your heart and soul into something and then get slammed isn’t easy to handle. But you learn to develop a tough skin.”
On the other hand, both women acknowledge that “The Mommies” was hardly all it could or should have been last season. They wanted to do the comedy as a TV version of what they did on stage but were more or less rebuffed.
Instead of dealing with two neighboring families, next season the emphasis will switch to four mothers who live in a cul-de-sac. “The husband and children will be de-emphasized somewhat,” Kentz said.
The new vow is to become more involved in the product. Over the summer, Kentz and Kristensen plan to hash out more real-life elements for “The Mommies”: the boredom, monotony, tedium and stress of motherhood.
Should be a big improvement.
