Joanna Kerns is Comic Perfection as Murderous Mother Knows Best

“Just call me and say ‘The carpet’s been cleaned,'” Celeste Cooper (Joanna Kerns) tells a hit man at the beginning of Mother Knows Best, after ordering the execution of her son-in-law. “I want whoever does this to be extremely careful,” she warns. “As careful as I am.”

Celeste, a socialite who is perfectly coiffed and manicured even while shopping for cheese, is indeed quite careful. So meticulous is this tireless fundraiser for charitable causes (recently honored as Handicapped Children’s Woman of the Year) that she times false accusations of assault against that same beleaguered son-in-law to coincide with her latest eye-lift.

You might ask why Celeste hates Ted Rogers (Grant Show), her daughter’s husband, so much that she wants him incarcerated or dead. Sure, his haircut makes him resemble a Dumb & Dumber character, but he’s a decent man committed to making Laurel (Christine Elise) happy. He even enlists a puppy to aide in his marriage proposal, knowing Celeste forbade her from having a childhood dog.

Ted’s undoing is his blue collar — he’s a mechanic who owns a small garage. When a meddling Celeste posed as her daughter, a habitually single nurse, and replied to his personal ad, she incorrectly assumed he was an automative executive. “Up and coming businessman, my ass,” she hisses to her wealthy, passive husband George (David Spielberg) when Ted shows up to their mansion covered in grease.

“Oh, sweetheart, you must be so disappointed,” she sympathetically remarks to Laurel. “When he said he was in the auto business, he failed to mention he was at the bottom!” To George she vows “Hell will freeze over before he touches my daughter.” But Laurel and Ted are soon married with a baby and Celeste, refusing to accept these developments, instead opts for estrangement and scheme-hatchery.

Besides the phony assault allegation and the murder-for-hire plot, Celeste tries to buy Laurel off. When that doesn’t work (“I’m not interested in your money. I never was,” Laurel tells her), she contrives to get Ted in trouble with the IRS. Then there are the terrible things she simply does for sport, like quietly humiliating his working class mom at an upscale French restaurant. She is indefatigable in her abject awfulness — and Kerns relishes every moment of it.

The anti-Maggie Seaver, Celeste is an unholy combination of Beverly Sutphin of Serial Mom and Wanda Holloway of The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. The screenplay (by Lisa Friedman Bloch and Kathy Kirtland Silverman) offers insights into the roots of her pathological insecurity but wisely refrains from going overboard. She didn’t get this way overnight, and if her antics aren’t new to her husband and daughter they shouldn’t be new to us.

Kerns is sublime as a delusional narcissist who can afford anything but honesty, and Jessica Walter is perfectly cast (if underused) as her equally posh best friend. Elise (of Beverly Hills, 90210) is quite adept at tucking her hair behind her ear and looking concerned. Her pairing with the square-jawed Show (of Melrose Place) is very ’90s, but Celeste’s relentless obsession with image and status, maniacal aversion to the truth, and complete disregard for the lives of her social inferiors feels as modern as ever 25 years later.

Programming Note: Mother’s Day Marathon

This review is part of our 2022 Mother’s Day Marathon feature. We’ll add more films throughout the week and you can click here for more information. For a more dramatic portrayal of a similar type of a mom, check out Bibi Besch in 1992’s Doing Time on Maple Drive, a gay TV movie classic.

Streaming and DVD availability

Mother Knows Best hasn’t been released on DVD. You can stream it for free (with ads) on Tubi or look for it on YouTube.

… But wait, there’s more!

If Mother, with its oddly sumptuous (for a telefilm) sets and director Larry Shaw’s brisk, mischievous direction, feels familiar, you might have found echoes of it in Desperate Housewives. Shaw produced that series, which premiered seven years after Mother Knows Best first aired, and directed 50 episodes of it.