Mama Malone

The series' main character was Renate Malone (surname rhymed with "baloney"), an Italian-American woman married to an Irish-American man (never seen in the series), thus the unusual pronunciation of her married name. She was the hostess of a home cooking show called Cooking with Mama Malone that was telecast live from her fourth-floor apartment in a Brooklyn tenement. Each episode began with her instructing her viewers to chop onions no matter what the recipe might be, and the recipes never were completed because a parade of characters kept popping in to interrupt her and eat up the show's time.

Initially, the show was scheduled to premiere in the fall of 1982, but was pushed back a season and a half. The series was reminiscent of another ethnically-based series, The Goldbergs, the radio and TV show written by and starring Gertrude Berg as a New York City resident of European Jewish descent that played on ethno-religious neighborhoods populated by immigrant groups. Among the good-natured stereotypes on Mama Malaone was Padre Guradiano, an Italian-American Catholic priest who wound up gasping for breath each time he climbed the steep stairs to her apartment.

• Lila Kaye as Renate Malone
• Randee Heller as Connie Malone Karamkopoulos
• Evan Richards as Frankie Karamkopoulos
• Don Amendolia as Dino Forresti
• Raymond Singer as Austin
• Ralph Manza as Padre Guardiano
• Sam Anderson as Stanley

Note: The rating presented here comes from the TV ratings guide website, and May not be completely accurate.

Mama Malone was poorly received critically and by audiences, owing to the characters drawing accusations of being stereotypical and Kaye, who was British, actually being miscast as an Italian-American.

The show had premiered in the spring of 1984, but it lasted for no longer than thirteen episodes, whose titles are given above, and was canceled in the summer of 1984 due to low ratings.

• Mama Malone at IMDb