Women will cheer them. Men will — well, they’ll do what men aren’t supposed to do anymore. Kids will wish they had one just like them.
They’re The Mommies. Picture a nonabrasive Roseanne without a chip on her shoulder and you’ve got Marilyn Kentz and Caryl Kristensen, the stars of a new NBC comedy series based on their nightclub act.
Before it was a club act, The Mommies was daycare-center and PTA-meeting entertainment. Prior to that, it was the real life of Kentz, 45, and Kristensen, 32.
As their characters put it in the premiere, “We’re real women, with real children, with real bodies.”
Kentz and Kristensen were neighbors and best friends in Petaluma, a northern California community so rural that the nearest mall is 45 minutes away.
“Mervyn’s. That’s all we have,” Kristensen said, displaying the same sense of humor that makes the series sparkle. “Let me tell you, we’re excited about those new fall colors of Cheetah sweats.”
Petalumans make their own excitement; home parties and craft shows.
“Crystal and Tupperware is big,” said Kentz.
“In designer colors,” added Kristensen.
They wanted more. That and Kentz’s midlife crisis three years ago pushed them into fooling around – an apt description – with show business.
They tried improvisational acting but hit an immediate snag. Their coaches would name a genre. “And we didn’t know what genre meant,” Kristensen said.
They figured comedy had to be easier. It was, but not until they realized their best material came from their everyday experiences as wives and mothers.
Initial reviews of their act weren’t glowing. “They said we were far from polished,” Kristensen said. “They’re still saying that,” Kentz chimed in.
Word of mouth, however, was terrific. It helped propel them from the Petaluma Women’s Club, which they rented for $50, to major showrooms, where they were paid handsomely.
Las Vegas and cable TV followed. An appearance at the Montreal Comedy Festival last summer caught the eye of all three long-established networks.
NBC won their services because Kentz and Kristensen connected with programming executive Perry Simon, who has since left the network. This probably explains the brutal regular time period opposite Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. (The Mommies premieres at a special time, 9 p.m. tonight.) The good slots go to series for which executives still at NBC can take a bow.
Because their act really isn’t one, the differences between the real Marilyn and Caryl and their characters on the series are cosmetic. They surnames are fictionalized but they keep their first names. Each has two children in real life and on the show, roughly the same ages.
The biggest discrepancy is that the TV Caryl is pregnant, which she isn’t in real life. “Maybe it’s me six years ago … or next year,” she said.
Kristensen and Kentz are nonstop funny but they are nobody’s fools. They understand what brought them so far, so fast and vow they won’t compromise the concept for television. “What’s funny to you is what’s relative to what you live. I don’t expect for somebody who doesn’t live my lifestyle necessarily to find every detail of my life funny. But there’s a whole huge audience of women who buy products all over America who will find our show funny and a release for them because it’s about our lives,” Kristensen said.
“We want to be real. We’re really speaking to the heart of the woman who needs to know she’s not alone,” Kentz added.
Besides, there’s no need to make things up when you’ve had a life as interesting as these two. Especially Kentz.
There’s a line in the premiere where she scolds her 17-year-old son and his bubble-headed girlfriend for skipping school and doing nothing but getting into a knot on the family couch.
“I was at Woodstock … naked,” Marilyn says. “There’s no way you can rebel that I haven’t seen or done.”
Kentz didn’t make it to Woodstock but she did live in a commune for a while in her younger days.
She also has a son whose girlfriend has lived under their roof since they graduated high school because Marilyn didn’t want them to jump into marriage at a young age, then regret it, as she had. Her second marriage is much happier.
But her real son isn’t as difficult as the TV version. “His way of rebelling is he listens to easy listening music. I can’t bear it,” she said. “He won’t be hip for me. His hair’s short, too. It’s a hairdo that says, ‘Oh, we thought [he had) a lice problem, but we got it before it got out of control.”‘ The most appealing trait of The Mommies is their down-to-earthiness. Discussions their characters have on the premiere about the unfairness of childbirth and the prospects for getting their husbands to agree to vasectomies are, biting, insightful and hilarious without being smutty.
Kristensen and Kentz said they consider it a tremendous compliment that their approach is being compared to Roseanne.
“She’s great. I love her show. I think it’s right on the mark a lot of the time. She’s done a great service for women in comedy,” Kristensen said.
“Yeah, we feel really good about [being compared to) Roseanne. I think our show will be a little different though. We’re more geared for the white bread cul-de-sac version. We upgrade when we move into a house.”
They’ve also upgraded NBC’s lineup by moving into it.
