Each episode dramatized, with warmth and humor, the Hansen family’s adventures and everyday travails in turn-of-the-20th-century San Francisco. The working-class Norwegian family included Mama, Papa (a carpenter), and children Katrin, Nels, and Dagmar. Mama’s sisters and an uncle were semiregular characters. Although earlier incarnations of the Forbes material had focused on the relationship between Mama and Katrin, the television series centered episodes on all the characters, a technique made avail- able and almost demanded by the production of a continuing series.

The stories might revolve around Dagmar’s braces, Nels starting a business, or the children buying presents for Mama’s birthday. The entire family would contribute to the drama’s resolution, however, and images of them sitting down to a cup of Maxwell House coffee—the show’s longtime sponsor—would frame each episode of the show. As George Lipsitz points out, it was common for the dramatic solutions to involve some kind of commodity purchase, not surprising given the commercial basis of American network television and the consumer culture of the postwar United States. What is surprising is how often the show foregrounded the contradictions of this consumer culture in which everyone does not have access to the desired goods. Dramatic tension often resulted from the realization that Mama’s endeavors provided the foundation for the achievements of individual fam- ily members. It was not uncommon for Papa and the Hansen children to have to come to terms with the value of Mama’s work.

The program’s complex treatment of cultural tensions resulted not only from Forbes’s original material but also from the contributions of head writer Frank Gabrielson, director-producer Ralph Nelson (a Hollywood liberal of Norwegian descent who went on to di- rect the film Lilies of the Field), and a distinguished cast. Peggy Wood, who incarnated Mama, was a versa- tile stage and film actress who had starred in operetta and Shakespeare and is probably best known to today’s audiences for her Oscar-nominated role as Mother Superior in The Sound of Music. (Mady Christians, who starred in the role of Mama on Broadway, was not considered for the television role because she was blacklisted.) Dick Van Patten played Nels and would later star in television’s Eight Is Enough in the 1970s. Robin Morgan, who played Dagmar from 1950 to 1956, became a well-known feminist activist and writer. Not surprisingly, she attributes to Mama many of her early lessons in feminine power.