Daily Dirt: Edith Bunker, June Cleaver and Marge Simpson were best moms in TV history

Daily Dirt for Saturday, May 7, 2022

If you’re a fan of Abby Ewing (known in real life as Donna Mills), you’ll want to keep reading until the very end … Welcome to today’s three thoughts that make up Vol. 278 of The Daily Dirt.

1. Sunday is Mother’s Day. First of all, happy Sunday to all moms reading this. Second, a happy Mother’s Day to the following TV moms, who in my opinion are the three finest/most interesting in network broadcast history:

• Gold medal: Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton), “All In The Family”. She had the sympathy of millions of viewers every Saturday night back in the 1970s.
• Silver medal: June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley), “Leave It To Beaver”. The perfect housewife, the perfect mother. Otherwise, she or Ward (Hugh Beaumont) would have personally smacked Eddie Haskell at least once.
• Bronze medal: Marge Simpson, “The Simpsons”. Sure, she’s a cartoon character, but she’s had to put up with Bart for more than 30 years. And Homer, too.

2. Also in the spirit of Mother’s Day, we offer our five favorite all-time TV couples:

• 1. Sam and Diane, “Cheers”: The on-again, off-again romance was an integral part of this classic sitcom. Not a Thursday night goes past when I don’t wish this show was still part of that famous NBC “Must-See TV” lineup.
• 2. Roseanne and Dan, “Roseanne”: Every middle-class American couple identified with these two. They had money issues and problems with their kids. We laughed with them, and if truth be known, probably shed a tear or two, too.
• 3. Kevin and Winnie, “The Wonder Years”: “You cannot think childhood love — your first crush, the first time you held hands, your first kiss — without thinking of Kevin (Fred Savage) and Winnie (Danica McKellar). “These two, whose story was set in the late ’60s and early ’70s, exemplified everything pure and magical about coming-of-age romance,” writes Carol Blackwelder on bestlifeonline.com.
• 4. Abby and (her husband of the year), “Knots Landing”: Yeah, I had a tremendous crush on Abby Cunningham Fairgate Ewing Sumner. I didn’t really care who she was dating or married to, just as long as Abby (Donna Mills) was on the screen every Thursday evening.
• 5. Doug and Carrie, “King of Queens”: If ever my life would be made into a sitcom, it would be modeled after the role of Doug Heffernan. That aside, Doug (Kevin James) and Carrie (Leah Remini) were a perfect cast match made in the late 1990s and early 2000s TV heaven.

3. Here’s our latest contribution to our list of most disgusting food and beverage items served around the world.

Mouse wine: A specialty in China and also South Korea, mouse wine is made by infusing rice wine with baby mice. It’s made by dropping live two-day-old mice into a bottle and leaving them to ferment for roughly a year. It is considered a health tonic. It’s thought to be a particularly effective remedy for asthma, as well as liver diseases, and is said to taste quite a bit like gasoline. After the wine has been drunk, the mice are often eaten. 

Steve’s Thought O’ The Day
Donna Mills is now 81. Steve still has a crush on her.

Steve Eighinger writes daily for Muddy River News. If “Knots Landing” ever makes a comeback, he wants to live next to Mac and Karen on Seaview Circle and make Abby Cunningham Fairgate Ewing Sumner Eighinger his wife.