Being a housekeeper may seem like a simple job, but not if you play one on TV. Housekeepers on TV not only have to make sure everything stays clean, they also have to act as surrogate parents, stand up for the family when they need it, offer sage advice, and occasional scream and drop something fragile when they find a dead body. Who are your favorite housekeepers? I'll tell you some of mine:
Mr. Belvedere: He once worked alongside some of the greatest minds in history, and now he's matching wits with Bob Uecker. Quite a step down, I must say.
Rosie the Robot: I loved the Jetson's sassy robot, even if she didn't always seem to work properly. My only question is, if everything in your home is automated anyway, why do you need a housekeeper? If nothing else, I give her credit for being the only maid on this list who is herself a vacuum cleaner.
Florence Johnston: The Jeffersons was one of those shows I watched with my parents as a kid and then later caught in syndication. I don't think Florence was the first or last TV housekeeper with an attitude, but she's one of the most memorable. She knew that no matter how badly she was treated by Mr. Jefferson and how much he bloviated and gesticulated, he wouldn't be able to get along without her.
Edna Garrett: More commonly known as "Mrs. Garrett," she's most recognizable for her role on The Facts of Life, but before that she played the housekeeper on Diff'rent Strokes, the show which spun off The Facts of Life. I place Mrs. Garrett in the same category as Mrs. Cunningham from Happy Days, as I think both characters embodied a kind of maternal instinct that always seemed to come very natural to the actresses playing them.
Lurch: Trust me, if you want to keep solicitors to a minimum, you want Lurch as your butler. Also, the behemoth could play a mean harpsichord. Rumor is that actor Ted Cassidy, who played the role of Lurch and would later become the voice of Godzilla in a series of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, actually did play the harpsichord on The Addams Family.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-19-2006 @ 12:09PM
Joel Keller said...
Uh... how 'bout the ultimate TV housekeeper: Alice from The Brady Bunch? Of course, there's always Hazel, too...
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5-21-2006 @ 8:44AM
Toby OB said...
Yeah, my first vote would have to go to Hazel as well. And although she was family, Aunt Bea still worked as the housekeeper for Andy and Opie.
There's also Benson DuBois, sort of the reverse of Mr. Belvedere - and I'm not talking about looking at the negative! (Sorry - just saw "The First And Last Supper" episode of AITF.) He started out as a housekeeper and worked his way up to the lt. governorship. The series ended with the possibility that he might have been elected governor.
And Marcia Wallace did a great send-up of the stereotype of the wisecracking housekeeper for 'That's My Bush!' back when it didn't hurt so much to find the President to be such a joke....
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5-21-2006 @ 8:48AM
Toby OB said...
Oh! And speaking of Lurch, in my concept of the TV Universe, he is a decaying yet still-living zombie corpse once known as Voltaire. Voltaire had been reanimated by Dr. Miguelito Loveless to be his henchman a century before in several episodes of 'The Wild, Wild West'.
Can't be proven, but it makes for a nice connection.
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5-21-2006 @ 10:02AM
Jamie said...
Toby,
Take it a step further. At some pint in the far future, Lurch's essence is placed into a robot body named Ruk. He is later discovered, alive and well, by Capt. James T. Kirk.
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5-21-2006 @ 4:03PM
Tammy said...
I would have gone with Hazel and Alice as well. I guess they were too obvious.
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5-21-2006 @ 4:30PM
jeff said...
please, please gimme some stars for adding two of my faves, Nell Harper, played by Nell Carter on Gimme a Break, and Mr. French, the ultimste "gentleman's gentlemen" on Family Affair, portrayed by Sebastian Cabot. He had the perfect life catering to the needs of Brian Keith's NY playboy Bill Davis, until the arrivals of adorable Buffy, Jody, Cissy and Mrs. Beasley changed his life forever..and made his life more than perfect.
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5-21-2006 @ 8:23PM
jeff said...
i'm done begging for stars, but must add perhaps in my last but certainly not least she's in a class by herself, Rosario.. as Shelley Morrison said on the Will and Grace retrospective, Rosario and Karen would take a bullet for each other.
and i feel bad for not previously mentioning Daniel Davis' Niles from The Nanny.
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