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When ‘Mom’ Focuses on Mothering, There’s No Stopping Its Potential

By Reed Gaudens

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Finally, the Bonnie and Adam drama has settled and made way for ‘Mom’ to get back to basics: mothering. Jill welcomes her teenage foster daughter, but is she prepared for the challenge?

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If Mom felt a lot like its old self in the latest episode, your senses aren’t fooling you. For quite some time, the sitcom got caught up in tricky territory, or as we’ll formally refer to it, the lackluster and exhaustive relationship of Bonnie and Adam. But after weeks of push and pull, Mom circles back to the defining theme at the center of the series: motherhood.

You’ll recall that Jill sought to become a mother early in Season 4 (how could one forget that Christy and Jill fight?), and her efforts to tack “mom” onto her short résumé come to fruition with a little help from Christy. How ironic. Although she’s initially denied a foster child because of her history with addiction, Christy sasses the case worker and sends 14-year-old Emily directly to Jill’s door. Should Jill have been careful about what she wished for? When it comes to Mom, getting back to mothering never looked so good. But for Jill? Trying to relate to an unaffected teenager isn’t such a good look.

Jill overcompensates with the “cool” factor, going a touch too Amy Poehler in Mean Girls with a purple hat that becomes the butt of a classic Bonnie zinger. As someone who has never parented a child much less a plant, Jill has been tossed into the deep end with an anchor tied to her ankle. No one enters into parenting wishing their child would skip the cute, stinky, Disney Junior-watching phase and go straight to the angst-riddled days of eye rolling. And that’s where Christy—who’s handled her fair share of Violet’s angst—flies in, cape waving in the wind.

Because Christy’s children aren’t always with her (Violet’s probably off spending Luke’s money and Roscoe lives with his father), we haven’t had the pleasure of watching her parent. In case you’ve forgotten, Christy’s a pretty great mother as proven by her ease with Emily. Sure, it’s a million times easier to bond with a child who hasn’t screamed “I hate you!” in your face a few times in their lifetime, but Christy cracked the kid code. Hell, she practically wrote the code. Jill’s fear that she can’t connect with Emily nearly causes her to back out, but she doesn’t give up.

Photo Credit: Mom/CBS, Acquired From CBS Press Express

Returning to motherhood with Jill’s fostering marks the smartest move Mom could make. If we’re not spending time in stories about Christy’s battles on the mothering front lines, then we need something else to add another shade of mom to Mom. (And Bonnie’s wayward attempts at advising Christy don’t count.) The series’ plot evolved into women’s shared experiences with addiction and how they lean on each other to stay sober. Jill’s journey with becoming a parent, complete with its struggles regarding her past, piles onto their shared experiences in a very personal way.

Arguably, we don’t need to spend time with Violet or Roscoe. While it’d be ideal, those stories have been mined 10 times over. On the other hand, Jill and Emily’s relationship arrives fully loaded with rich and thematically important narrative potential. Emily has been bounced around the foster system for years, an unfortunate living situation with which Bonnie can relate. Not to reduce Emily down to a plot device, but she serves to shake things up. Make Christy reach out to Violet. Force Jill to reckon with her conceit. Change the perception of what motherhood looks like. This, not the Bonnie and Adam debacle, is Mom.

Next: 'Mom' Meeting: Christy Gets In A Car Accident, But Why Is It All About Bonnie?

And one glaring detail piercing through the final handful of Season 4 episodes: The sitcom is aging, and it has a choice to make for its future. Mom will return this fall for its fifth season, having scored an early renewal from CBS last week. Moving forward with that motherload of momentum from the Jill-centric episode, Mom should commit to its reclaimed focus on its titular theme as hard as Bonnie commits to buttering up her tenants with banana bread.  It’s when the cast, especially the delightful Anna Faris, shines the brightest and the series fulfills its unstoppable potential for greatness.

What did you think of the latest episode? Are you on board with Mom’s returned focus on motherhood? Let us know in the comments!

Mom airs Thursdays at 9/8c on CBS.

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