RIP Linda Lavin

Linda's guest spot on "Mom" made for perhaps the funniest episode of network TV I've seen in the last 10 years (b/c I don't watch a lot of network sitcoms). She was perfect here as the passive-aggressive yet supportive Jewish Mom...had a very sweet scene in a later episode (I believe, might have even been the same one) where she expresses her support for Christy.

Echoing everyone else here who watched Alice regularly as a kid. RIP to a legend.

 

Alice was the show that always seemed to be on during middle school snow days in the early 80s.

I always thought a sweeping character drama of Mel's backstory (as I imagine it at least) would have made for an interesting film. I would just call it "Mel Sharples." But would Vic Tayback have had the acting range to pull off Mel's hardscrabble Depression-era youth, wartime trauma on an attack carrier hotbunking and peeling potatoes for 1,500 men while getting strafed by the Japanese in the Pacific, scraping to open his own place and then working 100 hours a week -- with no romantic prospects -- as he struggled to keep a small business afloat with dingy employees like Vera and with the only thing he had to be thankful for being the fact that he didn't have a bunch of red-tape bullshit to deal with in Goldwater's Arizona ?

 

She racked Tommy.

 

Kiss My Grits!

All I got from the series.

 

Oh the woman who played Jolene is still alive too. It’s her and Polly Holliday.

 

Lavin allegedly ran the Flo character off of the show.

 

I vaguely remember that episode (I don't remember many actual plotlines -- I don't think I saw an episode after I was about 12). Was that just implied on the show or confirmed?

 

While looking for the Vera-Tommy romance episode I found this. This is real TV.

 

I came after Alice, but I caught a lot of it on reruns in syndication. However, my first exposure to Linda Lavin was a kid (and now an adult) who loved Muppets Take Manhattan.

 

Great Savalas cameo. (The reason he sucked lollies in "Kojak" was because was a tobacco fiend and it kept down cutting constantly for smoke breaks. A miracle he made it to 72.)

 

The number of random guest stars they had was impressive: Telly Savalas, Jerry Reed, Art Carney, Dinah Shore, Meadowlark Lemon, Robert Goulet, probably forgetting some others.

Very 1970s and felt very mediocre, even back in the day.

 

But was apparently groundbreaking as it was the first sitcom based around a single mother.