Say goodbye to “Mom.”
By Mother’s Day, the Allison Janney sitcom on CBS will be a thing of the past. The network announced the end is coming after 8 seasons.
“Mom” starred Emmy winner Janney as the Mom, and Anna Faris as the daughter. But at the end of last summer, Faris suddenly announced she wasn’t coming back, and the show’s premise was left in the lurch.
Producer Chuck Lorre filled the vacancy with excellent secondary characters, but without a daughter there was no “Mom.” Frankly, they should have recast Faris’s part or had Janney announce a child she’d given away or something.
The ratings have been disappointing. Last April, the season finale had 7.1 million viewers. The season average was 6.2, excellent for such an old show. But this year, the average has been 5 million. Ironically, the last first run episode scored a 5.4 million, the highest so far.
Janney has an Oscar, several Emmys, she deserved a Tony for her “Six Degrees of Separation.” She is versatile and entertaining, one of our best actresses with a lot of great things ahead. Faris, however, has been silent since her announcement. There was speculation that she had personal issues that precluded being on camera, but no one knows what happened.
PS too bad– those secondary characters, played by Mimi Kennedy, Jaime Pressly, Kirsten Johnson, Bill Fichtner, and Jane Curtin, are the ones that suffer. Faris really wrecked things for them.
