How Mama's Family Died on NBC and Won in Syndication

The woman who played Mama turned the part down flat the first time it was offered to her, on the grounds that she had no interest in being old and fat every week. The network that finally put her on the air cancelled the show after two seasons and then ran the reruns for another year, where they did better than the original episodes had. And when a corporate merger dragged the series back from the dead two years later, it ran twice as long the second time and finished as the highest-rated first-run program in syndication, which did not stop its two stars from giving flatly opposite accounts of why it ended.

Mama's Family was created by Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon out of "The Family" sketches on The Carol Burnett Show, and executive produced by Joe Hamilton. It premiered on NBC January 22, 1983, lost its audience across repeated timeslot moves, and was cancelled in May 1984. Lorimar, freshly merged with Telepictures, revived it for first-run syndication on September 27, 1986 and ordered 100 episodes. It ran to February 24, 1990, six seasons and 130 episodes, and became the top-rated first-run syndicated program.

The spinoff Vicki Lawrence said no to

The character existed for years before the series did. "The Family" was a recurring sketch on The Carol Burnett Show, with Lawrence as Mama, Carol Burnett as her daughter Eunice, and Harvey Korman as Eunice's husband Ed. Producer Joe Hamilton, who owned the characters, wanted to spin Mama off into her own show during the ninth season of the Burnett series. Lawrence refused.

Her reasons were unglamorous and specific. "I had just spent nine months being pregnant," she told the Television Academy Foundation in 2011. "I didn't want to be an old lady every week."

She pushed back on Hamilton repeatedly in her telling of the conversation. "I said, but what if it doesn't, what about Carol and Harvey?" she recalled. "He said, well, they can make a guest appearance. I said, but what if it doesn't work? He said, then you'll come back here. I said, with my tail tucked between my legs? No, no, I don't want to be old, and I don't want to be, I don't want to be fat. I don't want to do it."

Burnett's reaction was the opposite. "Carol, on the other hand, said, yay, this means we get to keep doing it on my show," Lawrence said.

What changed her mind was a television movie. About a year after the Burnett show ended, Burnett commissioned a 90 minute CBS special called Eunice, and brought the script to Lawrence in person. "I was lying by the pool in Hawaii, and she came out and threw it under my nose," Lawrence said. "She said, read this, see if you want to do it. And I read it, and I said, well, it's good, but Mama dies at the end. And I said, it's not even a good death scene. And she said, don't be greedy. You want to do this or not?"

CBS held the finished movie for a while, unconvinced it would do much. Then came the screening at Burnett's house, and the ambush Lawrence's husband had predicted in the driveway. "No sooner had the credits rolled," she said, than "Carol and Joe and Harvey were all on me going, you have to do this as a series. You have to, you, you don't need us." Burnett's closing argument: "sweetie, you need, you need to do this for you." And: "it's going to be a slam dunk."

Two seasons and out

It was not a slam dunk. Mama's Family premiered on NBC January 22, 1983, taped at CBS Television City, and the first numbers were genuinely strong: the premiere episode ranked 25th for the week with an 18.6 rating and a 28 share, per the Merced Sun-Star's April 1983 report on the show. That was enough to justify a second season.

The second season is where it came apart. The show moved timeslots repeatedly, dropped out of the top 50, and lost share to CBS and Magnum, P.I. NBC cancelled it in May 1984. The final episode of the network incarnation had aired April 7.

Lawrence had no illusions about what that meant. Asked whether she thought syndication might be in the future, her answer was one word long: "No, I figured it was over."

Ken Berry, who played Mama's son Vinton, is careful in his own interview about how little he knew. He was in the cast, not the meetings. "I was never in on that part of making that show and nobody ever invited me to be in the writer's room or to be in on conferences or anything like that," he told the Television Academy Foundation in 2012. "So I don't know how the decisions came to be made."

That caveat matters, because he then offers an explanation for the NBC cancellation that the archival record does not support. Asked why NBC cancelled it, Berry answered: "Oh, there was Vicki. Vicki wanted to quit, she wanted to do something else. I guess she was just tired of doing it." He added, "And she just wanted out. And, God, we could've gone on for a long time, you know? But she wanted to get out."

The paper trail says otherwise: a show that fell out of the top 50 in its second season and lost its timeslot fight was cancelled by its network. Berry's memory of a star walking away belongs to a later chapter, and it is worth holding onto, because he tells it again about 1990.

There was one more piece of evidence NBC handed over on its way out. The network kept running Mama's Family reruns for another year, until September 1985, and those reruns performed well. A cancelled show was quietly proving it had an audience.

The merger that brought it back

The revival did not come from anyone's affection for the series. It came from a corporate reorganization that needed product.

Lawrence describes the mechanism in business terms. "What happened was that [Lorimar] merged with Telepictures," she said. The buyers were the new arrivals: "And all the young guns at Telepictures, who were all about the syndication, got to looking at the... they were looking for projects." What they found was a show with a record behind it. "It was a hit. The demographic was phenomenal. It just never got the show. It never got the shot that it needed. Let's take it and put it into first-run syndication. It's going to be a huge hit."

Her summary of who resurrected the show is precise about motive: "it was those young guys that said, this is a show that never had a chance."

The archival record agrees with her on the mechanism. Lorimar had just merged with Telepictures and was hunting for projects for the growing first-run syndication market, and the strong summer rerun numbers made the case. Joe Hamilton Productions revived the show, Lorimar-Telepictures distributed it, and the order was not for a cautious half season. It was 100 episodes. The new version premiered September 27, 1986.

There was almost no precedent to reassure anyone. "At the time, the only show I can remember that was in first-run syndication was Too Close for Comfort," Lawrence said. "And I thought, well, I guess if Ted Knight can do it, I can do it."

For Berry the revival was not an interesting career development, it was a rescue. He had assumed the cancellation was permanent. "Oh, I definitely thought it was over, yeah," he said, and what he thought was coming instead was the road: "I thought I was facing another, maybe the rest of my life. Being on the road, you know, being out, being, that struck me at some point. I'm out here, and I'm not sleeping in my own bed, and I'm not, I'm out here so I can pay for the mortgage on a house in California. None of this makes any sense, you know? Except that I had to have the money, and that made sense."

Then the syndication call came. "So it was nice to be able to go back to Los Angeles and stay there for four more years."

What changed when the network stopped watching

The second Mama's Family was a different production, and the differences are measurable rather than sentimental.

The show moved out of CBS Television City to Metromedia Square, where it stayed from 1986 to 1990. Lawrence's description of the new home is not flattering and not bitter: "there we were out at this little studio that really didn't have a lot of amenities and sort of felt like a little orphan child."

What the orphanage bought was freedom. "But I have to say, they left us alone," she said. "They didn't meddle at all like the networks can do. They were hands-off. You'd send them an episode, they'd send you a check. And they did not meddle at all. Consequently, we had so much fun when we were in syndication. That show just ran like a top."

The crew was continuity in a show that had lost most of its cast. "I was really lucky enough to take much of the staff from the Burnett show," Lawrence said. "So the schedule ran smoothly." By the end, the production was working a four day week.

The cast that came back was not the cast that left. Only some of the originals returned, and Lawrence lost two of them to the same rival hit. "Between the time that we were on the network and the time that we went to syndication, I lost both Betty White and Rue McClanahan to the Golden Girls," she said. "Both of them. And they didn't take me with them."

The most concrete syndication mechanic is in the running time. NBC episodes ran 24 to 25 minutes. Syndicated episodes ran 21 to 22. Local stations sold more advertising inside the same half hour, and the show absorbed the difference by getting shorter.

The tone shifted too. Berry, comparing the two versions, said the syndicated show "became a little more lighthearted," where the network run had gotten "kind of hurtful, and nobody thought that you could sustain that. So we kind of did away with that a little bit."

Carol Burnett did not come back as Eunice. According to Lawrence's autobiography, as carried in the show's archival record, Burnett resented Lawrence for taking the syndication deal with Joe Hamilton, whom Burnett was divorcing at the time, and the estrangement lasted until Hamilton's death in 1991. The two later reconciled.

The show that was not allowed to win anything

Syndication paid, and it cost something that clearly still stung decades later. First-run syndicated programs sat outside the awards system, and Lawrence raised it herself, unprompted, in an interview conducted by the Television Academy.

"The one thing I do regret, and I'll tell you this because this is the Academy," she said, "I regret that we were orphans and that we were not allowed to be nominated for anything."

Her reasoning was about standing, not trophies. Judging by her fans and the comments she still gets, she said, "we're like a classic sitcom. And one that people revere highly when they're talking about their favorite sitcoms. And yet, we were a little bastard child who was not really allowed to be recognized."

By the ratings, the exclusion looks stranger still. After the move to syndication the show became the highest-rated first-run program in syndication, a standing reported by the Eugene Register-Guard in July 1987.

Why it ended, told two ways

Mama's Family aired its last episode February 24, 1990, with 130 episodes made. On why it stopped, the two leads do not merely differ in emphasis. They contradict each other.

Berry's account is that the star wanted out, exactly as he said about the NBC cancellation six years earlier. "Why did it end?" he repeated. "Well, Vicki just wanted out." He added that he had no direct knowledge: "I never had a conversation with her about it, nobody ever asked me what I thought, and they couldn't keep it on without Mama, so they ended it."

Berry then raised the other explanation himself, and dismissed it. He noted that once a show has a certain number of episodes, distributors are more willing to put it into permanent syndication, and allowed that this "may have had something to do with it," along with finances. Then he closed the door: "but I've heard since that no, it was all Vicki."

Lawrence's account is the reverse in every particular. In her telling the show was healthy, the cast wanted to continue, and the syndicator stopped ordering because it had banked the episodes it needed. "It was like the little Energizer bunny, and we all wished it would just keep running forever and ever," she said. "But they said, no, we have enough episodes to syndicate now, so we're pulling the plug."

Asked directly, later in the same interview, whether the syndicated show stopped because it had hit the episode count needed for syndication, she confirmed it again in a word: "Yeah."

So the man who says he was never in the meetings attributes the ending to a decision by his co-star, on the strength of what he has "heard since." The co-star, describing the same ending, says the decision was the distributor's and that she would have kept going. This page does not have a document that settles it, and it will not pretend the two accounts can be reconciled. What can be said is that the 100 episode order placed in 1986 and the roughly 100 syndicated episodes produced by 1990 are consistent with Lawrence's version, and that Berry twice explains a cancellation by pointing at Lawrence, including once where the archival record plainly points at ratings instead.

How the telling has grown over the decades

• April 23, 1983, Merced Sun-Star. Dan Lewis reports on the new series while it is still alive, recording the premiere's 25th place finish, 18.6 rating and 28 share, and the judgment that the first season was solid enough to earn a renewal. This is the contemporaneous evidence that the show worked before it failed.
• September 26, 1986, Los Angeles Times. Lee Margulies covers the revival at the moment of launch, tying it to the Lorimar and Telepictures merger and the growing first-run syndication market. The business explanation enters the record here, in print, on the eve of the premiere.
• July 19, 1987, Eugene Register-Guard. Ten months into the revival, the trade result is reported: Mama's Family has reached the top of first-run syndication.
• August 10, 2011, Television Academy Foundation. Vicki Lawrence sits for a full oral history with Stephen J. Abramson. Her chapters supply the refusal of the original spinoff offer, the Eunice script delivered poolside, the merger and the "young guns" who revived the show, the Too Close for Comfort precedent, the hands-off distributor, the loss of Betty White and Rue McClanahan, the awards exclusion, and her account that the syndicator pulled the plug at the episode threshold.
• March 7, 2012, Television Academy Foundation. Ken Berry's oral history, also conducted by Abramson, adds the cast-level view: his exclusion from production decisions, the road he expected to spend the rest of his life on, the relief of the revival, the tonal softening in syndication, and the competing claim that both endings came down to Lawrence wanting out.
• Mama Knows Best, Complete 4th Season DVD. A cast reunion featurette with Dorothy Lyman is cited in the archival record as a second source for the 100 episode syndication order.

The drift is worth naming rather than smoothing. The disagreement is not about atmosphere, it is about causation, and it runs in one direction: Berry attributes both the 1984 network cancellation and the 1990 syndication ending to Lawrence's wish to leave, while the contemporaneous record attributes the first to ratings and Lawrence attributes the second to an episode count. Berry is transparent that he was never in the room, which makes his testimony honest and secondhand at once. The dates themselves are not in dispute anywhere: January 22, 1983, April 7, 1984, September 27, 1986, February 24, 1990. The reasons are.

The honest bottom line

Mama's Family was a broad, loud sitcom about a mean old woman in a wig, spun out of a sketch, cancelled by a network that had good reason to cancel it, and brought back not because anyone loved it but because a merged studio needed inventory for a market that was suddenly buying. It came back shorter, cheaper, in a studio with no amenities, missing two of its best-known cast members, and ineligible for the awards its star clearly wanted. And it worked. The audience NBC could not find on a moving timeslot was sitting there in the rerun numbers the whole time, and 100 episodes later the show was the biggest thing in first-run syndication. The reason it still runs is the thing Lawrence identified herself: "everybody has a Mama in their family," and she compared the character to Archie Bunker on exactly that basis, that everyone knows one and nobody admits to being one. A show that gets thrown away and then outlasts the network that threw it away is not an accident of nostalgia. It is what happens when the people counting were measuring the wrong hour.

Sources

• Television Academy Foundation, The Interviews, Vicki Lawrence, interview conducted by Stephen J. Abramson on August 10, 2011 in Long Beach, CA (parts 1 and 2).
• Television Academy Foundation, The Interviews, Ken Berry, interview conducted by Stephen J. Abramson on March 7, 2012 in North Hollywood, CA (parts 2 and 3).
• Merced Sun-Star, "A shaky reunion for 'Mama's Family'", Dan Lewis, April 23, 1983, page 12 (premiere rating, share and weekly rank; first season renewal), cited via the show's archival record.
• Los Angeles Times, "The Fall TV Season: TV Reviews", Lee Margulies, September 26, 1986 (Lorimar and Telepictures merger, first-run syndication market), cited via the show's archival record. The original was not directly retrievable this session.
• Eugene Register-Guard, "'Mama's Family' hits top in field in sitcom", July 19, 1987, page 8E (highest-rated first-run syndicated program), cited via the show's archival record.
• Mama Knows Best: A Mama's Family Cast Reunion, featurette with Dorothy Lyman, Mama's Family The Complete 4th Season DVD (100 episode syndication order).
• Wikipedia, "Mama's Family" (creators, production companies, network and syndication run dates, premiere and finale dates, season and episode counts, running times, taping locations, cancellation and revival record), cross-checked against the interviews above.

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of Charles in Charge and the full story of Punky Brewster.

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