I’ll start off by saying something positive about the show Mom, as it does feature a woman played Ana Farris who is at least trying to get her life in order after going through the trials of drug and alcohol abuse, but from there it’s kind of a downward spiral that doesn’t really make the return trip all that often. Some might call that a pessimistic attitude since there are rays of light within the series when things actually go right, but then you look at how many different ways Mom really kind of drops the ball in the name of ratings and it kind of snowballs afterward. There’s one thing that people are always going to love no matter whether they deny it or not, and that’s the misery of other people. It makes them feel better about their own lives and invites a sense that they’re doing all right because these fictional characters are a mess and things tend to turn out okay for them. For all those people that allow themselves to fall so far into the fictional side of TV there’s a huge face-palm coming up eventually since shows like Mom are not a good baseline to work from.
Here’s a few reasons why the show Mom should have run its course by now.
The Plunkett’s are another dysfunctional family intent on raising the bar.
People tend to forgive a sitcom for a lot of things since those that understand it’s fictional tend to think, and rightly so, that it’s all for entertainment. That’s very true, and therefore it’s easy to dismiss some of the more disgusting and nasty things they say and do. But in a world where kids are eating Tide pods and snorting condoms there’s always someone out there willing to think that this is how you go about having a good life. The allure of being edgy, hardcore, and in any way cool for doing the kind of things the Plunkett’s have done seems to be among the new trends since a lot of people don’t seem to understand what a decent home life is like any longer. In other words the Plunkett’s have become a poster family for the way things are in this day and age. A lot of people would gladly argue this point and they’d be right to do so, but the fact remains that the Plunkett’s are as close to the new Cleaver family as we’re bound to get for a while. In fact it’s almost fair to say that they might actually be on par with the Bundy’s.
Most of the character arcs have hit a plateau that has the writers stymied.
A lot of times you’ll hear about writers finding a point in a story arc that just can’t seem like it can move forward without doing something seriously messed up or overly dramatic. In the case of Mom this has already happened and the shakeup has shown that it’s simply time for the show to move on and ship out. The character arcs have played out, and it’s time to admit that there’s not much else to be done for it. It’s said that recovery and the act of maintaining sobriety is a lifelong thing, and that’s more than accurate, but in terms of running a sitcom people usually want to know that their favorite characters aren’t going to relapse. They want to know, or at least believe, that these characters are going to be okay once the screen fades to black and the credits start to roll. Just letting it go on and on seems to indicate that they need constant watching over and that it could be a constant tripwire that these women have to dance upon for an indeterminate amount of time. Eventually that kind of act does get a bit old.
Mom is an entertaining show to be sure, but at this point it almost feels as though it’s getting kind of stale and should move on and allow another show to come along and take its spot while it falls into the rerun category. On top of that, a lot of the stars that have been featured in the show wouldn’t be too affected by its cancellation since they have pretty solid careers that they’ve established long before or since they were featured. Right now it simply feels as though the show has really run out of ideas and is simply being pushed to an audience that might take the time to watch it or not and is willing to sit through each episode in the hope that something new might emerge instead of a trending pattern that one might see throughout several different similar shows.
Every now and then producers need to know when to pull the plug and move on.
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