MR. ADAMS AND EVE “The Mothers.” CBS, 15 March 1957 ( Season 1 Episode 6). 30 min. Howard Duff, Ida Lupino, Olive Carey. Guest Cast: Lee Patrick, Olive Blakeney, Walter Woolf King. Written by Sol Saks, Bernard Ederer & Robert White, based on characters created by Collier Young. Director: Richard Kinon.

   The premise of this 30 minute comedy show was that Ida Lupino and Howard Duff, movie stars in real life, would play a married couple who were also movie stars, but concentrating on their life at home (which of course often overlaps their professional lives as well).

   I don’t know how I happened to be thinking about this series, but it somehow came to mind as a very funny show that was on while I was in high school. I didn’t think anyone else would remember it, but I went looking and of all things, I found several episodes to see for free on YouTube.

   

   I may have picked the wrong one to watch In this one, it accidentally happens that both Howard’s ad Eve’s mothers end up staying with them at the same time. As they are quite opposites in nature (Eve’s mother has been in show business for quite some time, Howard’s mother from Washington state and is rather naive about big city ways), they expect the worst.

   As it turns out the two mothers find themselves fighting over the same man. Pot roast comes into it as well, and it is up to the maid of the house (Olive Carey) to finally straighten things out.

   I may have had a crush on Ida Lupino at the time, or why else would I have remembered this show so well for all these years? This is the least funny comedy episode I can ever recall watching. The script is so lame the actors have to resort to exaggerated facial expressions and other gestures of the head to to give their lines any oomph. Not even the laugh track can find anything funny in this one, not even to giggle at. This was, to say the least, disappointing. There are times when you really can’t go home again.