The Best TV Moms of the Last 20 Years

While we're off celebrating the real women who birthed us into this world, here's a small tribute to the best TV moms of the last 20 years. Warning: A link to this piece probably won't suffice as a Mother's Day gift to your own ma, but we can't stop you from trying. So cough up the cards and fork over the flowers or, if you dare, fire up these video clips in tribute to some of the very finest matriarchs to grace the small screen.

Lorelai Gilmore (Gilmore Girls)
Her daughter's best friend and her mother's worst nightmare, Lorelai handles every situation with an admirable combination of grace and sass. Though she tends to overdo the witty banter, we can't get enough of her perfectly timed pop-culture references.


Clair Huxtable (The Cosby Show)
Smart, quick-witted and even-keeled amidst all manner of domestic goofery, Clair presided as a loving disciplinarian for her kids, their kids and, often, her own husband. Her role as a pioneering, family-balancing professional African American woman is well-noted, less so her  legacy as the likely source of those infamous Cosby Sweaters.  


Marge Simpson (The Simpsons)
Considering the men in her family, Marge is arguably the most patient TV mom of all time. Couple that with her staggering, skyscraper-esque coiffure and the fact that she's simply a great role model, and it's no surprise that we love the Simpson matriarch.


Sophia Petrillo (The Golden Girls)
Our favorite 90-year-old house mom once said this to her daughter: "Jealousy is a very ugly thing, Dorothy. And so are you, in anything backless." But despite the wisecracks, Sophia's tales of her salad days in Sicily always come with a much-needed moral. 


Nancy Botwin (Weeds)
Plenty of moms take on second jobs to feed and clothe their kids, but dealing marijuana in McSuburbia takes maternal dedication to a whole new level. (Although, we gotta say, she could probably put a kid through college with the amount of cash she drops on iced coffee.)


Tami Taylor (Friday Night Lights)
Balancing her roles as wife of a small-town football coach, high school guidance counselor and mother to a whip-smart, independent teen daughter, Tami is the rock of tiny Dillon, Texas, with every smidgen of her deep love and frustration evident in each patient flutter of her over-mascara'ed eyelids.  


Jean Weir (Freaks and Geeks)
The perfect foil to her perpetually-ranting husband, Jean's bubble-headed squareness drove her kids Lindsay and Sam up the wall—us, too, and we loved her all the more for it.


Estelle Costanza (Seinfeld)
Just the sound of Estelle's voice should be reason enough to give your mom an extra hug today. Pretty much any scene where she and her husband Frank interact with their son George is about as uncomfortably awesome as it gets, but this one is tops.


Colleen Donaghy (30 Rock)
The woman is rather insufferable, but we have to admire anyone who can so fully fluster her CEO son. And there have been a few brief glimmers of true sweetness below her curmudgeonly exterier, like the matter of what Jack calls her "yuletide boyfriend, Frederick August Otto Schwarz III." As Liz Lemon aptly balked, "Jack, I think your mother put out on Christmas to get you kids presents!"


Ruth Fisher (Six Feet Under)
Despite her outward appearance as a reserved suburban housewife, Ruth is anything but. "Guilt-ridden widow of funeral-home proprietor with three independently bat-shit kids, an affair with half-her-age Rainn Wilson and an impulsive marriage to some other complete stranger" is more like it, and her unlikely late-blooming made her one of the most compelling characters in a cast chock full of them.

Dr. Beverly Crusher (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Only the coolest moms take their sons with them into space, and Wesley got to visit the final frontier on board Star Trek's Enterprise thanks to the best mother in sci-fi-dom. The entire crew almost always did the right thing, but it was Beverly who set the ethical standard when faced with an endless stream of moral quandries. 


Lucille Bluth (Arrested Development)
Selfish, materialistic, financially irresponsible—if she's okay by Buster, she's okay by us.