Karin Argoud

Mama's Family is an American sitcom television series starring Vicki Lawrence as Mama (Thelma Harper).

The series is a spin-off of a recurring series of comedy sketches called "The Family" featured on The Carol Burnett Show (1967–78) and Carol Burnett & Company (1979).

The sketches led to the television film Eunice, and finally the television series.

Mama's Family aired on NBC, debuting on January 22, 1983.

For 1½ seasons from 1983 through 1984, Mama's Family ran on NBC.

In the series' first episode, Thelma Harper lives with her uncomfortable, uptight spinster sister Fran (Rue McClanahan), a journalist for a local paper.

Thelma's son Vinton (whose wife Mitzi had left him to become a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas) arrives to inform Thelma that he and his two children, Sonja and Buzz, have been evicted from their home and need a place to stay.

Much to Fran's chagrin, Thelma allows the trio to move in.

During the first season, Vinton forged a relationship with the Harpers' flirtatious next-door neighbor Naomi Oates, whom Thelma disliked, and soon married her.

After selling Naomi's house and losing the money in a bad business deal, Naomi and Vint are forced to move into Thelma's basement, where they remain for most of the show's run.

Also seen on a recurring basis were Thelma's two daughters: the snobbish Ellen (Betty White) and the ornery Eunice (Carol Burnett).

Harvey Korman, who directed many of the earlier episodes, made featured appearances as Eunice's husband, Ed Higgins.

After several timeslot changes and a subsequent drop in ratings, the network cancelled the series; the final episode of this two-season NBC incarnation of the series aired on April 7, 1984.

NBC broadcast reruns until September 1985, which unexpectedly performed well in ratings.

Two years after its cancellation, original series producer Joe Hamilton Productions (JHP) revived Mama's Family for new episodes in first-run syndication on local stations across the United States.

The reincarnation, distributed by Lorimar-Telepictures, premiered on September 27, 1986.

The modified four-season series revival gained substantially higher ratings than its first incarnation, eventually becoming the highest-rated sitcom in first-run syndication, with its final episode airing on February 24, 1990.

The show's theme song is "Bless My Happy Home," created as an a cappella by Lawrence.

The show's producers chose to use an instrumental of Lawrence's song composed by Peter Matz.

Disclosing the lyrics to the song as part of her Vicki and Mama: A Two Woman Show (untelevised stand-up comedy routine Lawrence has hosted as herself and Mama since 2001), Lawrence routinely performs the song in its original a cappella form.

The lyrics were also featured in an advertisement for the show on MeTV.

The show is set in the city of Raytown, which actress Vicki Lawrence later revealed to be Raytown, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City (although the script writing suggests the setting was Raytown, Mississippi, given the rural southern nature of the series).

The television series revolves around the wacky misadventures of the Harper family, extended non-Harper family members and their neighbor friend in later seasons.

Always at the center of all the trouble, turmoil and misunderstandings is head of the clan and matriarch Thelma Harper (Mama)—a thickset, gray-haired, purse-lipped, mid-to-late 60s widow who is portrayed as explosively quick-tempered, abrasive, and brash.

Mama's snappy retorts and wisecracks are featured in a running gag in which the final scene of each episode cuts to an exterior shot of her residence (1027 Montrose Avenue in South Pasadena, which was also the house of Lynda's character in the 1978 film Halloween. The home was only featured briefly in the film where Lynda walks toward the front door ) while Mama's voice is heard making a sharp or witty reply to whoever had previously spoken.

This is then followed by audience laughter and applause.

In spite of Thelma's derogatory attitude, regular zingers and sarcasm, she is nurturing and obliging at heart, allowing family members to live off her in her home who would otherwise have no place to live, while also regularly cooking for and cleaning up after them.

In the ninth season of The Carol Burnett Show, producer Joe Hamilton wanted to spin off Mama into her own series, but Lawrence turned him down.

She did not wish to wear a "fat suit portraying an old lady every week," and she had misgivings about playing the role without Harvey Korman (who played Mama's son-in-law, Ed Higgins) and Carol Burnett (who played Mama's daughter Eunice Higgins) regularly by her side as in "The Family" sketches.

Burnett and Korman told Lawrence that they would only appear as guest stars on the new series, and that it was Lawrence's time to shine and take what she had learned from The Carol Burnett Show and make it on her own.

Shortly after the highly-rated Eunice TV movie, with continued urging by Korman and Burnett, Lawrence finally changed her mind and accepted the offer for her character's own sitcom.

The writers had created Raytown to be its own "cartoon-like" world outside of reality.

Although the series was sold to NBC without a pilot, the network had its own requirements, such as having "normal" teenagers as seen in other sitcoms of the time, which is how the Buzz and Sonja characters came about.

However, Lawrence had a great deal of creative input and made many important decisions, including bringing in Korman very early on to co-direct the series.

Lawrence objected to the original script of the episode "Mama Cries Uncle", in which Thelma's brother-in-law visits and the two supposedly wound up sleeping together:

I went to the writers and I said, 'I'm sorry, she is nothing if not Bible Belt.

She would never sleep with her brother-in-law.

I don't care how dead her husband is, This is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong'.

Well, threw everything into a tizzy and Joe [Hamilton] said, 'Gotta listen to her,' and they re-wrote the second half of the show.

According to her autobiography, Lawrence had a problem with the decision to tape the series on Stage 33 at CBS Television City, where The Carol Burnett Show was produced.