Who liked the show "Maude" (1972-78) ?

I love Maude, OP. It surpasses The Golden Girls for me, but I also gave a “thing” for all things 1970s.

Some of the writing for Maude is very topical, and those bits are very much of their time (not a bad thing because I enjoy it for the nostalgia).

That first season was well written and a favorite. Some of the seasons are better then others. I own the boxed set of Maude.

Maude was better than the Golden Girls.

And then there's Broad!

The late, great Donny Hathaway did the theme song!

Susan Harris did some writing for Maude.

Mrs Naugatuck played by Hermione Baddeley who at one time was married to David Tennant brother of very gay and feminine Stephen Tennant.

When it aired I was 14 or 15 at the time. I watched it, my mom watched it - I don't think my dad did, though he loved All In The Family and Archie Bunker's Place until the end. I'm sort of mixed, about it. I didn't really like Bill Macy or Adrienne Barbeau - or even Rue M. who was so brilliant later on Golden Girls. Bea Arthur was loud and obnoxious - funny and entertaining sometimes, other times just loud and obnoxious. One epsiode I remember is when Maude was having a party and some kind of breakdown - I forget the particulars but Bea A. was brilliant. Another thing I remember is Bea/Maude calling Mrs. Naugatuck "Mrs. Naugahide."

I liked it a lot. It's one of a few shows where I own the entire show on DVD.

It sort of had a similar trajectory as Designing Women - the first few years were the best, through the end of Mrs. Naugatuck's time on the show.

But once they got to Season 5 or so, I think all the possible situations with Carol, Philip and/or Arthur and Vivian had been kind of covered, and all that could be said about Maude being a limousine liberal had also been said.

I felt that over the course of a season, they did a good job of alternating very broad comedy with fleshing out all the characters and doing topical stories. I mean, it was very real, some of the things Walter and Maude went through - he was drinking, he slapped her, he got sober, etc.

The episode where Maude is on the analyst's couch is a tour de force. Period. End of story.

One of my favorite episodes is one where Arthur and Vivian have a falling out and uninvite Maude and Walter from a party being held at their home (with Fay Wray as guest - so Arthur says, we don't see her). The fight they have near the end of the episode is glorious and one of the funniest routines in the whole series.

And Bea's timing was EXQUISITE - in that episode, and all the time. Her deadpan "WTF?" look is hilarious.

She was just so manly, though.

Of course shows like Maude and All In The Family were supposed to be topical, but as a young teen I'd often roll my eyes when a sitcom got serious and covered some touchy topic. While I think AITF did it well, Maude could be heavy-handed.

R10 As much as I love Maude I do think AITF was better at balancing the preachiness.

But I also thought that Maude's preachiness was part of making her more human. They always took pains to point out that she herself was guilty of some of the things she complained about.

AITF did a good job of making Archie human and not a monster. And Maude showed that a well intentioned liberal could also be foolish and a hypocrite, too.

[quote]Maude could be heavy-handed.

Have you ever LOOKED at Bea's hands?

There's one episode that cracked me up I've never forgotten it.

Maude's Aunt (Aunt Pitty?) dies and Maude becomes unglued because there is nobody to tell the bad news to, since Carol and Walter have already told everyone they've ever met. It's funny because there's this human truism about sharing the news of someone's death that seems necessary. It was hilarious to me and I was about twelve years old when I saw it.

R13 is talking about “Maude’s Guilt Trip” - a final season ep that is among the best of the series.

Other good ones from later on - “Viv’s Dog”, “Vivian’s First Funeral” and the ep from Season six where Maude sees a flying saucer (can’t remember the ep name).

[quote](can’t remember the ep name).

Thank god for small favors.

They had a hell of a nerve giving the main character a sidekick named Viv.

So the Datalounge has got itself a bonafide antenna tv troll now, huh?

I thought Maude's friend Vivian Harmon was a gorgeous and very sensual woman.

From what I recall as a youngster, I didn't like the show when Florida left and was replaced by Mrs. Naugatuck. I didn't find the back-and-forth with her and Maude as funny as I did with her and Florida (again, I was a kid and most of the jokes were off my radar). I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

Something I noticed:

In episode 2 there's a long discussion about 'nudity' (Carol and Maude think it's fine, Walter is 'on the fence', and Arthur is totally against any kind of nudity in public). At one point, a drunk Walter starts disrobing and takes off his shirt. For a 50 year old man back then (1972) when 'physical fitness' was not common among men that age, I have to say Macy had a nice chest and torso - nothing to be ashamed of (though he was on the ugly side).

I, too, preferred Florida to Mrs. Naugatuck.

Florida had a better chemistry with Maude.

IIRC, Bill Macy had just finished a run in a Broadway musical that included a lot of nudity (O' Calcutta or Hair maybe - I can't remember which one)...when he was cast as Walter on "Maude".

So he'd probably gotten in shape and stayed in shape for that role.

Bill Macy was a lovable nut case.

I like Maude way better than Golden Girls. There was more there there. She played really well off of Rue, Bill Macy, and Connie Bain. Adrianne Barbeau and almost all of the maids were somewhat limited comedy wise, though.

Some episodes were like mini-plays.

There's one where Vivian (Rue) answers the door naked to greet her husband, only to find Maude and Walter. She screams, slams the door. The camera is on the BACK of Maude and Walter. The laugher from the audience goes on and and, when when it starts to die down, suddenly Bea Arthur shifts her hip, and the laughter starts again- very Jack Benny like with comedic timing, she was.

Anyone remember the spin-off featuring Mrs. Naugatuck called Cockney Kook? It was the only English language series ever to have English subtitles.

"Maude" was very progressive and well-written for its time - especially in the first 5 seasons.

CBS cancelled "Petticoat Junction" and replaced it with "Maude".

That means one week they were broadcasting a bland sit-com with the Bradley Girls singing familiar old songs around the piano.

The next week Maude was talking about taboo topical issues. And in her first season, she got pregnant and tackled the Abortion issue.

"Jesus saves at Findlay's Friendly Appliances" (Maude's response when Walter wanted to start going to church)

[quote]it lost it's steam.

Oh, dear!

I think the crossover chemistry between Bea and Rue jumping across two classic TV series as theirs did, is often unfairly overshadowed by the more well-known such crossover co-featured chemistry in earlier TV-sitcom years between Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance first on "I Love Lucy" and then together again on "The Lucy Show."

After seeing the care the dressers on The Golden Girls took to dress Bea and the other girls it's shocking to see how badly she is dressed on Maude. Yes it was the 70s and supposedly feminism replaced the need for women to dress up but still she really looks awful.

Florida and Maude had chemistry but so did Mrs. Naugatuck.

The third one, eh, not so much.

The problem for me watching the original run of Maude was that my parents’ angry, loud fighting drowned out a lot of Maude and Walter’s angry, loud fighting.

[R28] However, Lucy and Vivian Vance were playing 'Lucy and Ethel' in both shows. "The Lucy Show" was very weak, trying to capitalize on 'I Love Lucy'.

Bea and Rue didn't repeat 'Maude and Vivian' on 'The Golden Girls' - they created two completely different characters.

[quote]"The Lucy Show" was very weak, trying to capitalize on 'I Love Lucy'.

It wasn't I Love Lucy, which really hadn't been a weekly series since 1957, but they did some very funny comedy routines (the antenna, the shower, etc.). They just didn't have husbands, so the audience didn't have that feeling of, "Oh-oh, wait until Ricky finds out", which made things so much more funny on ILL.

The Aunt Twinkie episode is the best

^

“Tinkie”

Maude meeting John Wayne is a classic episode.

Is there anyone In the 1970s who didn't have a Maude Findlay as a friend's mother (or as their own mother) growing up?

"Maude Meets Florida" is one of the funniest. Esther Rolle stole the show in that episode.

To be fair, r29, there was a period in the 1970s when almost everything you saw in clothes shops was horrible. Maude’s feminism had nothing to do with the awful sartorial sense.

I remember most of the housewives I grew up around in the 70s having similar wardrobes. Yes, the costume designer did seem to favor long caftanesque items, especially in the first few years - ostensibly to soften Bea's height. Later years were a bit more classic.

The gray hair is still shocking. Surely she was not the first mature aged woman who had gray hair on TV, maybe the first who was the central character.

[quote]Surely she was not the first mature aged woman who had gray hair on TV, maybe the first who was the central character.

You called?

As a gayling, it drove me crazy that the credits sequence ended on a house with a big screen door ... and then cut to Maude opening an entirely different front door with NO SCREEN DOOR.

Anyway, enjoy the "extended Maude Credit Sequence" from The Family Guy. Always makes me laugh.

Poor Doris Roberts was cast as Vivian. She came in, saw old friend Bea Arthur, and they went into an old improv routine together. The producers happened to be there and watched, and it cinvunced them Doris and Bea were too similar. Had Doris known that that was going to be an issue, she could easily have played it differently. But as it was, she was fired.

And yeah Rue played Vivian very differently, at first. She was matronly- WASPY- a noncaustic version of Maude. Later on, she became a aging sort of ditsy bimbo. I remember women like her I'm the '70s and '80s- Estelle Parsons played a version of it on All in the Family.

[quote]Is there anyone In the 1970s who didn't have a Maude Findlay as a friend's mother (or as their own mother) growing up?

R36. Me, I guess. I don't think I ever encountered anyone like Maude until I saw the TV show.

R4 that’s great, his daughter is very talented. I liked the show as a little kid (yes I’m old no secret there) because she seemed to have clever comebacks to everything said to her while being extremely chilled out.

Carol Burnett's 'Broad' spoof of Maude is funny; ironically, Isabel Sanford is playing maid 'New Jersey'