I binge watched the entire Maude series recently

"Carol, what did I want with his power tools?"

We watched it early in lockdown and it started off wonderfully and became so terrible. I loved the episode in which she hosted a fundraiser for a black political radical and didn't have any non-white friends to invite. Eventually we reached a point where we wanted fewer Very Special Episodes about Walter and more appearances from Adrienne Barbeau, who just sort of disappeared.

What do you mean, OP?

[quote] She was so pathetically desperate to virtue signal her “good” thoughts on race that she was blinded to her own ignorance

That was the point, wasn’t it?

God is going to get me (Walter) for this but Rue McClahan looked 60 since Maude.

“Maude” was better than “The Golden Girls” and certainly “All in the Family”. Bea really shined in it.

R5 and she was totally forgettable on Maude too. She was born to play Blanche Devereaux.

OP - Why did you put yourself through that!

OP, Carol Burnette parodied MAUDE as BROAD, pretty much lampooning ultra-white liberals.

God'll get you for that, OP.

They were all so Maude-lin.

I just saw the first two seasons. Season one was not very good, but season two was fantastic.

Beatrice Arthur was astonishingly good in season two and the writing was strong. In a 70s sitcom format is somehow managed to hit some complex emotional territory.

And it was very funny.

I thought we had good comedy on television today, but little of it rises to this level.

The character of Maude was based on Norman Lear's wife, Frances Lear. Read her book, The Second Seduction. Frances was an out-of-wedlock baby, born to a mother who gave her up for adoption. Her adoptive mother was a horror story. This poor woman really lived a hellish life. The character of Maude reflects Mrs. Lear's politics but seemed to be more kindly, upbeat and optimistic.

OP, you're right, and that was very much part of the point. Norman Lear wanted Maude to have faults, as well, and she was, indeed, often a well meaning "limousine liberal" of her day, a woman who was generally a decent person, but could be awkward about how little she had in common with those she supported.

Just as an asshole like Archie Bunker had some decent spots, so an intelligent, decent woman like Maude would have her weaknesses.

The Mrs. Dubonnet episode early on is a great example of the awkwardness Maude could create when she tried to assume that she was the white saviour. I never found it "odd," it was literally a comment on the type of person she was. It can be jarring to compare to our 2022 sensibilities, but in the 1970s whites and blacks were in some cases really interacting and living and working together in new ways that hadn't been very frequent before, so Maude was a way to show the pitfalls of being that well meaning, arm's length liberal - and though I loathe the term and find it overused, I'm sure there's some shared DNA between Maude and a "virtue signaling" person of the 21st c.

As for the show itself....I loved it - the first few seasons were the strongest.

Like "Designing Women" it had a very specific focus in its earlier seasons and turned to more broad comedy as time went on.

But it probably should have ended with Season 4 or so. After Mrs. Naugatuck left they were really running on fumes. But many good episodes before that.

Yes, it did have a tinge of the "very special episode" flavor from time to time, but that's to be expected from any show in the 1970s. If it were out today, Maude would have probably been a dramedy or a streaming show, of course.