The Parents Television Council has issued its list of the top 20 moms on broadcast TV over the past 20 years. (http://w2.parentstv.org/blog/index.php/2015/05/04/twenty-years-twenty-to...)
“On television today we seldom see the idealized mothers of generations past. TV moms today may be working mothers, they may be step-mothers, adoptive mothers, widowed or divorced single mothers; their homes are sometimes messy, their kids aren’t always perfect, but the TV moms on this list are protective, they are loving, they are tough when they need to be, and they sometimes make mistakes, but they are constantly striving to do better," said PTC.
As a Boomer, I am all about the idealized moms of, ahem, more than 20 years ago that boys fell in love with on syndication-filled, Twinkie-fueled schoolday afternoons — though I also love Frankie Heck of The Middle and Tami Taylor of NBC’s Friday Night Lights, both of whom made the list. (The list was in no partciular order, so anone who read my initial blog in which I was all over the rankings, forget it. There were none. Though, in my defense, they had numbers by them and no suggestion the numbers were not rankings. Sigh).
I have had some close encounters with "idealized TV moms" myself.
At the White House Correspondents Association Dinner a couple of year back, I was able to tell Tami (aka Connie Britton) that she had been robbed of an Emmy at least a couple of times. She could team up with Hugh Laurie as the Emmy-robbed couple in my humble estimation.
Many years back, I chatted with June Lockhart (Timmy's mom — OK, one of several — on Lassie) at a TV news awards banquet — she is, or at least was, something of a news junkie.
But my favorite encounter was walking down an aisle at the NATPE convention only to hear a woman’s voice ask me if I wanted milk and cookies. It was Barbara Billingsley promoting the syndicated Leave it to Beaver update of many moons ago. She was wearing a dress, yellow, I think, with a full skirt and pearls. I, of course, dutifully — and happily — had my milk and cookies.
Then, or course, I was in love with Diahann Carroll on Julia and Gloria Henry on Dennis the Menace and Whitney Blake on Hazel and, well, those would be top moms in a different category where I am not currently going.
