Entertainment News

Home

Movies

Streaming

Music

Quizzes

Newsletter

'Mom' co-creator Gemma Baker says Anna Faris leaving the show was 'a huge loss'

By Megan Armstrong | Last updated 6/22/21

Five weeks have passed since Mom wrapped its successful eight-season run on CBS, and co-creator Gemma Baker is reflecting on how her team handled losing Anna Faris from the cast and tackled an unexpected ending.

"We absolutely loved having Anna Faris at the center of our show for seven seasons, so of course when she left it was a huge loss," Baker told The Hollywood Reporter. "In the seasons leading up to our last season, there had been an organic shift that happened, where the show had become more of an ensemble, so we were able to lean into that and go deeper with our other characters."

Faris portrayed Christy Plunkett from the pilot episode through the seventh season finale. The 44-year-old actress announced her departure last September, and her character was written off the show as earning a full scholarship to Georgetown Law School. The eighth and final season premiered Nov. 5.

Mom began with Christy and her mom, Bonnie (Allison Janney), reuniting after spending years estranged. Both are alcoholic single mothers, and the series followed them in active recovery from their addiction.

Eventually, the premise branched out to focus more on Christy and Bonnie's sobriety support system at their Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The ensemble cast rounded out with Marjorie (Mimi Armstrong), Jill (Jaime Pressly), Wendy (Beth Hall) and Tammy (Kristen Johnston).

"When we found out that we weren’t coming back for another season, I think we only had five more episodes left to shoot, and two of those were already written," Baker added. "The last three were bringing this home, and probably the Jill [Jaime Pressly] storyline was a little more rushed than it would have been had we had more time. I think if we had known at the beginning of the season that this was going to be the last one, we would have done things differently and taken more time with certain stories."

Jill, who had long struggled with fertility, got back together with the love of her life, Andy (Will Sasso), and became pregnant. She married Andy in the series finale. The final scene of the series featured Bonnie doing her share at the A.A. meeting, taking under her wing a new mother and daughter struggling the way she and Christy were at the beginning:

Baker also touched on why the decision was made the end the show in an open-ended way as well as how that challenge compared to having to abruptly end Christy's story arc:

"Because of the nature of the show, it didn’t feel truthful to have an ending where everything is tied up in a perfect bow, because the show has always really been about reality and characters being in recovery and showing up for life on life’s terms. Sometimes these terms are good and sometimes they’re not so good, but it’s these women showing up for life no matter what, sober and together. We wanted to tie up some loose ends, which I actually think we did a lot of in the penultimate episode. That’s where we first find out that Jill’s dream of becoming a mother is happening, and we were able to have Marjorie and her son reach a deeper part in their relationship and show that he had a new level of forgiveness and understanding of his mother. We also got to see Bonnie really come to appreciate Marjorie on a deeper level and recognize how much Marjorie means to her, and Tammy started this new relationship, and Wendy took a risk and, hopefully, you got the sense that was something she was going to do more of in her life as well. That episode in a way was part of the finale. This show started with the idea of doing a sitcom that was about redemption and hope, and I think the finale really spoke to that. There was the redemption of seeing how much Bonnie had changed over eight seasons and the hope of passing recovery forward to two newcomers.
[...]

"The season premiere was challenging in terms of how we were going to deal with Christy’s absence. But nothing was harder than the finale, because we wanted to bring the show to a close in a way that was meaningful and that did the best for our characters and the cast and our audience. At the same time, a lot of us were having a hard time because we had suddenly found out that this thing that we really loved doing with people we really loved was coming to an end. One of the many things I will miss about working with [co-showrunner Nick Bakay] is he always had these great sports analogies and often talked about 'playing hurt,' so if one of the writers was going through something personal but they were coming to work and doing their best, he would acknowledge them for playing hurt, and in the finale, we were all playing hurt in a way."

Baker co-created Mom with Eddie Gorodetsky and Chuck Lorre—the latter of which also co-created Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory.

Janney earned two Primetime Emmy Awards for her portrayal of Bonnie.

More must-reads: