YMMV / Mama's Family

• Adaptation Displacement: A lot of the show's younger fans don't know that it was based upon a recurring sketch from The Carol Burnett Show. This is especially ironic given that the "Family" sketches were some of the earlier show's most popular.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: The whole half-hour series took the characters from the Carol Burnett Show sketches and put a completely different spin on them, particularly Mama. On Carol Burnett, Mama was a practically villainous character who browbeat Eunice into an emotional wreck. On Mama's Family, Mama was cranky, but basically good, and Eunice was a histrionic brat who caused her own problems. This is particularly true in the syndicated run, where Eunice never appears.
• Broken Base: Fans of the NBC episodes vs. fans of the syndicated episodes. Then there are those who hate both runs and tout the original sketches as superior.
• Designated Villain:
  • Petey, the loudmouthed parrot Thelma inherited from her Uncle Oscar in "Mama Gets The Bird". Granted, he talked too much and said a few insensitive comments towards Thelma, but the way she carried on towards him and made some rather personal remarks like how nobody wanted him (in spite of the rest of the household being smitten with him) and even threatened to kill him just for annoying her. In the end, considering her greed and resentment, him flying away from the house and her losing out on his $50,000 cage after throwing it away was rather karmic.
  • In "Family Feud," when the Harpers appear as contestants on Family Feud, the audience is naturally meant to root for them over the Van Courtland family, but aside from being presented as stuffy, upper-crust socialites they don't actually have any negative interactions with the Harpers that would give any reason to root against them. At least Webster Van Courtland allowed both of his kids to appear on the show and didn't sideline his own daughter like Vinton does in the episode with Sonya (making the Harpers' loss another example of Laser-Guided Karma).
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Doddering Aunt Effie (played by series writer Dorothy Van) was just a one-shot character from Vint and Naomi's wedding in season one. She proved so popular she was bumped up to recurring character during the syndicated run.
  • Betty White's character Ellen Harper-Jackson, who was a gloriously witty Alpha Bitch and the only one of Thelma's kids who wasn't a neurotic wreck, was very popular with fans.
  • For the syndication episodes, Bubba. Not just for the eye candy reasons, but also for his relationship with Thelma, as far as being the second chance she had at raising a kid and not screwing it up like she had with her flesh and blood.
• Funny Moments: In the series' first Christmas Episode, "Santa Mama", Mama dresses as a mall Santa, and her encounters with children are documented in a series of photos. One such photo was taken just as a bratty kid kicked her in the shin, and the photo captured her pained expression.
• Growing the Beard: Some consider the syndicated run to be this, given the Character Development (Vinton became less intelligent, but was given more to do in this role, Thelma actually became kinder—but not any less snarky—and Naomi's sluttiness was toned down), the Denser and Wackier tone, which actually worked and the significant trimming of the cast, namely in the case of Buzz and Sonja (see The Scrappy below.)
• Ham and Cheese: Carol Burnett's Eunice is even hammier in the series than in the original sketches (and her scenes were definitely the better for it).
• Harsher in Hindsight: One of the earlier "The Family" sketches during the original Carol Burnett Show had Eunice and Thelma attend a parent/teacher conference with one of Bubba's high school teachers (played by the episode's guest star Dame Maggie Smith). In the sketch, Smith basically tells Eunice that her son is brilliant but emotionally troubled by his home life and that she feared for his future. The meeting is quickly derailed by Thelma and Eunice bickering, at which point when the sketch ends, Smith is left alone basically torn up when she realizes the extent to which Bubba's home life is fucked up and how he has no real chance to escape the vortex. When we finally meet Bubba, in season three of the show, he has officially become a juvenile delinquent and has served a stint in prison/on probation until he turns 21. And his mom Eunice (who he confirms was utterly worthless as a mother) has abandoned him by moving to Florida with his father, leaving him with no place to go except his equally abusive grandmother (though by that point she was nowhere near the abusive crank she was in the Carol Burnett sketches).
  • Could also be Heartwarming in Hindsight too, as Bubba does improve himself throughout the series and Thelma probably took that teacher's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to heart.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Seeing Rue McClanahan be such an uptight prude as prissy spinster Aunt Fran becomes this once you consider her later role of Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls.
  • The episode where Bubba had made a video project of the family that ended with them all appearing to be bad-mouthing Mama through the "magic" of Manipulative Editing (or as it was in that case, a conveniently malfunctioning record button) is titled "The Really Loud Family".
  • In "An Ill Wind", Thelma calls Naomi "Ms. Poker Face".
  • In "Bed and Breakdown", a couple comes over to stay at the Harpers home during the Tri-State Fair. The couple is referred to as The Thornberrys.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Thelma, as played by a padded-up Vicki Lawrence to appear fuller like a grandmother. Thelma looks around to be a US size 8-10.
• Karma Houdini: In the season 3 episode "Buck Private Bubba," Sergeant Gibbs (played by Donald May) is shown be to extremely dishonest when it comes to recruiting for the US Army - resorting to false advertising and emotional manipulation to get men and boys to sign on (which is how he initially gets Bubba to enlist after his date's father tells her she's too good for him). He is also implied to be borderline sadistic once he's left alone with new recruits, clearly more enjoying the power he has over people than anything else. But, when he's made aware that Bubba can't enlist due to still being on probation for car theft, not much happens to him other than being privately humiliated by an old woman and being one less recruit short after sending Bubba home. He's still free to go about procuring other gullible young men with the same shady tactics - if only now a little wiser.
• Moment of Awesome: In the season 4 episode "Child's Play", Reverend Lloyd Meechum, the Harper's henpecked minister, finally grows a spine and thoroughly and firmly spanks his grandson, Eugene, for constantly putting the Harpers through hell with his various pranks, much to the horror of his wife, Alberta, who was blindly convinced that Eugene was a complete angel who could do no wrong, and in fact was blaming Mama for bringing Eugene's behavior on herself. Doubles as Hilarious in Hindsight as the actor who played Eugene, many years later, as an adult, played a similar one-time character in iCarly, who wreaked havoc, and in the end, met a similar fate at the hands of Spencer.
  • Thelma corners Naomi's sexist boss (who has been sexually harassing her) in his office playing both the role of Abhorrent Admirer and Mama Bear where she gets him to admit that he has been doing this to several baggers in the tri-county area so the whole store can hear.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • When Eunice was a little girl, Mama killed her pet rabbit and cooked it for dinner.
  • Eunice and Ed not showing up for Bubba's graduation was this for a lot of people.
  • And even before then, moving to Florida without telling Bubba or Mama what was going on, knowing full well that Bubba was being released from juvenile detention, and his probation prevented him from leaving the state until he was 21, forcing him to move in with Mama.
• Nightmare Fuel: A rare example for Mama's Family, but "Fangs Alot Mama" is the only time the audience ever sees the Mystic Order of the Cobra that Vinton belongs to and - although played for laughs - it's pretty creepy. For instance, when Thelma is "hissed out" of the induction ceremony while in disguise, she is surrounded by men in snake attire using their gloved hands to imitate a snake bite while hissing loudly (even Thelma - who still manages to tell them off and get out unscathed - is weirded out by this, saying in the next scene: "It was the most horrible sound I ever heard! Like someone had struck a hole in the Goodyear Blimp!"). It doesn't help that the words to the Cobra's "hiss out" chant are also extremely graphic ("He's not fit to be a snake/Chop him up with hoe and rake!/Known to all as a disgrace/May the mongoose chew your face!").
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Vicki Lawrence is the head of a family that includes Rose Nylund and Blanche Devereaux.
  • After the series ended, Beverly Archer went on to play Gunny Alva Bricker on Major Dad.
  • Fred Willard plays a crooked used car salesman in "Mama Buys a Car".
  • William Windom, prior to playing Dr. Seth Hazlitt on Murder, She Wrote, plays the title character in "Mama's Boyfriend".
  • In "The Sins of the Mother", Iola's younger self is played by a young Nikki Cox.
  • Jim Geoghan wrote three episodes. Geoghan is best known as co-creator and co-executive producer of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.
  • Sara V. Finney and Vida Spears wrote an episode. Both are best known as co-creators and co-executive producers of The Parkers.
  • Danny Kallis wrote an episode. Kallis is best known as creator and executive producer of Smart Guy and also served as co-creator and co-executive producer of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.
  • Earl Boen, who plays Lloyd Meechum, the Harpers' henpecked minister (and appeared as a clergyman character on other series, including The Golden Girls), should be known to Kim Possible fans as one of the voice actors for Senor Senior Sr., sharing the role with the late Ricardo Montalban, as well as Simon Stagg and Mr. Bleakman. Filmgoers would recognize him as Dr. Silberman in the first three Terminator films. And fans of The Secret of Monkey Island know him as the voice of Big Bad LeChuck.
  • Yeardley Smith, better known as the voice of Lisa Simpson, plays an escaped fellow inmate of Bubba's in "Where There's Smoke".
  • Mayor Alvin Tutweiler is Alan Oppenheimer- Skeletor, Man-At-Arms, Mer-Man, Prime Evil, and Beachcomber, Warpath and Seaspray.
• The Scrappy:
  • Aunt Fran was seen as this by some, due to her unnecessarily uptight manner making her come off as a bit bitchy at times. Rue McClanahan herself actually hated how prissy Aunt Fran was, as she had signed on the series under the expectation that the character would be more man hungry, thus making her the primary foil for Thelma. However, the producers were so impressed with Dorothy Lyman's performance as Opal on All My Children, that they decided to make her character, Naomi, the resident slut and primary foil for Thelma instead.
  • Not even the writers liked Buzz and Sonja, Vinton's two kids in the NBC run, as evidenced by the characters being written out with exactly zero explanation when the show returned in first-run syndication. Buzz was a bland and uninteresting Cheerful Child who never received any Character Development throughout the two seasons, while Sonja started out a completely obnoxious, lazy, and unlikeable Bratty Teenage Daughter. Her personality lightened up considerably when season two rolled around, but the writers struggled to find much for her and her brother to do, leading to the majority of that season's episodes having the two kids appear only for minutes at a time before leaving. Vicki Lawrence has expressed some regret at the two characters and actors ultimately not having much of a chance to develop before they were removed from the series.
• Values Dissonance: A given for a 1980s TV show about an older woman in a Missouri small-town but there are a few, one example is "Sins of the Mother" where a flashback had Thelma and Eunice arguing about the girl getting drunk and Thelma yelling that if she didn't get drunk by Eunice's father, Eunice would not have been conceived. Hard to swallow now given that getting someone under the influence before intercourse or having sex with someone under the influence counts as rape.

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