My Mother the Car



In 1965 NBC put a show on opposite Combat and Rawhide about the antics of lawyer Dave Crabtree (Jerry Van Dyke, who would later be more famous for Coach), a typically hapless sitcom family man who discovers that his mother has returned from the grave as a 1928 Porter open touring automobile (a Ford Model T modified by the then-ubiquitous George Barris, who also did the Monkeemobile and the '60s Batmobile).

My Mother the Car was critically lambasted and caused NBC to be something of a laughing-stock for greenlighting it in the first place. The Ratings were horrid. (Except in what we now call the young-adult demographic. Back then, they didn't track that sort of thing.) In spite of all that, NBC left the show on for an entire season.


 * And Starring: Miss Ann Southern
 * Back from the Dead
 * Bland-Name Product: Averted, surprisingly -- although practically no one remembers it today, Porter was a real automotive manufacturer active between about 1900 and 1925.  However the actual car used in the show was, as noted above, a Ford Model T (a former hotrod, in fact!) that had been heavily customized.
 * Dead Person Conversation
 * Old Shame: James L. Brooks wrote two episodes before hitting it big. Naturally, he doesn't boast about his involvement in this. (A Simpsons DVD Commentary joked that mentioning said involvement around the studio is cause for being fired.)
 * The co-creator of the show was Allan Burns, who went on to create The Mary Tyler Moore Show with Brooks. If you look closely at the program grids hanging on the Station manager's wall in The Mary Tyler Moore Show you'll see that WJM showed My Mother the Car quite frequently.
 * So Bad It's Horrible
 * Temporal Paradox: How does a dead mother get reincarnated into a car that already exists?
 * Presumably, by "Reincarnated", the writers meant "Got stuck in a car and possessed it."
 * They Fight Crime