Karen Grassle & Michael Learned Shared the Same Boring TV Mom Reality

Karen Grassle, Little House on the Prairie, Season 1, 1874 — Everett Collection

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Famous moms Karen Grassle and Michael Learned bonded over the monotony and frustrations of their on-screen duties.
Both actresses described how their roles often involved repetitive actions like pouring coffee and standing by the stove while male characters had the main dialogue.

Karen Grassle and Michael Learned are often mentioned together as two of television’s most beloved mothers, Grassle as Caroline Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie and Learned as Olivia Walton on The Waltons. But behind the warmth audiences remember, both actresses describe a surprisingly similar, annoying on-set reality, one that involved a lot of standing near the stove and pouring coffee.

In an interview on The Jim Masters Show, Grassle is asked whether she related to Learned’s comments about the frustrations of playing a TV mom. “Oh my god. Yes,” she said. Grassle explained that Learned is a friend, and that they bonded over “this exact experience of the frustration of the role of the mother in these series.” Grassle then paints a picture that longtime viewers can instantly visualize.

Monty Sherman/TV Guide/Everett Collection

She recalled how scripts got very monotonous for her. “Writers would write, ‘Carolyn comes from the stove with the coffee pot to the table,'” she said. “‘More coffee, dear.’ And then Charles and the Reverend or Charles and the Doctor or Charles and somebody would have a scene.” After repeating that routine enough times, Grassle decided to make her point creatively. “I was so tired of that coffee pot and that line,” she added. “So, I made up mugs for the whole crew that said, ‘More coffee, dear.’ And they never wrote that line again.”

Another interview for Mother’s Day with CH6Television has Learned describing nearly the same pattern from The Waltons. She said that when she first joined the show, it felt like “all I did was pour coffee,” because the production wanted the mother’s presence in the scene. Learned listed the familiar activities, working at the stove, kneading bread, pouring coffee, all while others carried on the main dialogue. She even joked that she poured so much coffee it became a running gag, adding that she eventually put it into one of her contracts: “No pouring coffee this season.”