Bonnie Franklin

One of the joys of being cognizant of the MST3KCU is knowing that you’re going to encounter all sorts of celebrities at all sorts of strange moments of their careers. As I have never actually watched the original One Day at a Time (I’ve watched a considerable amount of the remake), I must confess that the place I’ve seen Bonnie Franklin the most is in the short “You’re the Judge,” wherein she and a friend (Sherry Alberoni) win over a couple of boys through the power of Crisco. I’m pretty sure she’s the taller one, the main character if a short sponsored by Crisco can be said to have a main character that isn’t congealed vegetable oil. I will say that the biscuits and fried chicken look delicious, if fairly grey due to degradation of the film stock.

It wasn’t Franklin’s first role. At age nine, she had appeared on The Colgate Comedy Hour. She was actually a student at UCLA while playing a home ec-obsessed high school girl, but that’s Hollywood for you. She’d spent a year at Smith, where she’d been onstage in a play at Amherst, but she returned to California and her acting career. Though in 1970, she made her Broadway debut in Applause, a Lauren Bacall-starring musical adaptation of All About Eve. Her role was minor, but she sang the show’s title number and made a huge splash.

Her biggest splash, however, came in 1975, when she was cast as Ann Romano, divorced mother of two living in Indianapolis. The show was one of Norman Lear’s comedies, which meant comedy interspersed with social issues. The production seems to have been deeply troubled, not least because of costar Mackenzie Phillips suffering from substance abuse problems. Mary Louise Wilson was written in as Ginny Wroblicki to be her best friend, but the actresses didn’t get along and the character was unpopular.

The fact is, I’m a little too young to quite be in the demographic of people who think of her as one of the iconic TV moms. The show started slightly before I was born, and it ended before I was old enough to watch primetime TV. It might have aired in syndication at a time I could watch it, but I somehow never did. By the time I was aware of TV moms as they aired, we were moving from Clair Huxtabel to Marge Simpson. TV moms vary a lot, and there are some you’d rather have than others.

As with a lot of the people we’ve covered, Franklin did keep working after her best-known role. For one, she did a lot of theatre, a thing she apparently preferred. She worked in AIDS activism. And she did a handful of episodes of The Young and the Restless. As someone who has sought out and watched John Oliver’s General Hospital scenes, I am not in the slightest surprised that she played a nun who helped someone who was recovering from amnesia.