Every generation has an iconic TV mum of its own. The OG is Leave It to Beaver’s June Cleaver, an archetypal 1950s housewife who was never not wearing pearls. The Brady Bunch’s Carol was a groovy sitcom mum and stepmum – a Seventies update that acknowledged the changing shape of families. Her women-can-have-it-all 1980s successor was Clair Huxtable from The Cosby Show, who juggled five kids and a legal career.
There have been prickly but loving mums (Sophia in The Golden Girls), bad but good mums (Married… With Children’s Peg Bundy), and high-strung but devoted mums (Claire Dunphy from Modern Family). They weren’t idealised but they got the job done with panache. Lorelai Gilmore from Gilmore Girls, which ran from 2000 to 2007, has long been considered a high watermark in the annals of TV mums. She’s so good at being a mum, she’s hardly a mum at all, but a friend. Now, I’d like to formally induct Nikki Newman, from the Apple TV+ sitcom Trying, to the exclusive club of TV mums worth rushing home to.
It’s an overdue distinction. Across the British sitcom’s first two seasons, Nikki, played with irrepressible gumption by Esther Smith, and her partner Jason (Rafe Spall) are “trying” to adopt a child. (In the pilot, the London couple are quickly informed that IVF won’t be successful, no matter how many more times they attempt it.) And so they embark on the wearying journey towards adoption, with its rigorous schedule of interviews and inspections and notoriously long waits – a deft twist on what it means to be “trying” for kids. There’s never any question that Nikki should be a mum, just plenty of bureaucracy threatening to get in the way. But in last year’s emotional season finale, Nikki and Jason were (provisionally) approved to adopt Princess, a young girl set to be separated from her even younger brother, Tyler.
And so in season three, we get to see Nikki be the mum she’s fought so hard to become. She smashes it from the first hurdle when she insists on keeping Tyler, who stows himself away in the family car. But most of motherhood isn’t grand heroics. It’s remembering to bring a water bottle literally everywhere you go. It’s knowing everyone’s blood type. It’s making a million tiny decisions without even realising it.
My favourite thing about Nikki’s style of motherhood is how naturally her new role seems to suit her, even as we see her struggle with it. The show makes a careful distinction between being an effortless mum and a natural one. When I started watching Gilmore Girls as a teen, I was smitten with the repartee between Lorelai and her 16-year-old daughter, Rory, whose real name was also Lorelai. (I loved that.) They ate junk food together and drank diner coffee. They had their occasional dust-ups, but mostly their relationship felt easy. To my teenage eyes, this was the ideal TV mum: long-haired and relaxed, always down for a movie marathon. It’s like the Lorelais didn’t even have to try.
Nikki, on the other hand, is always trying. And I think a lot of mums – myself included – will recognise themselves in a woman who mothers her kids instinctively and with a lot of hard work. When Princess pushes her away, for example, Nikki first tries waiting for the rebellion to pass (yeah, right). Then she tries to win Princess over by spoiling her (doesn’t work), followed by dipping a toe in the waters of tough love (not even). She beats herself up even though she’s done nothing wrong. This is what parenthood is: a million best attempts and, crucially, micro-adjustments.
Heartbreakingly for Nikki, the kids take to Jason – who quits his job to be their primary caregiver – almost immediately. To be fair, he’s got Fun Dad, another classic TV trope, written all over him. But it’s Nikki, whose parenting approach is high on empathy and aspirationally low on googling, that feels like a Hall of Fame TV parent to me. It’s not easy for her to put herself in Princess’s shoes, but the desire to try to understand her kids is unfailing. In the season three premiere, Nikki tells her daughter, who hasn’t had a stable living situation in who knows how long, that she’s a “little bit meerkat” – a worrier always on the lookout for danger. I teared up. More than once this season, Nikki will explain her kids to themselves in ways that transform the hard parts of their personalities into adorable assets.
I’ve been convinced that Trying is the sweetest show on television since it premiered in 2020. Every broken character is affectionately broken; the conflict, aside from the question of Nikki and Jason’s impending parenthood, is mostly low-stakes. On a colder show, maybe adoption wouldn’t be the unmitigated blessing it appears here. But there are plenty of series about how tough it is to be a parent and perhaps not enough unafraid to be so sentimental about it. At times, it was hard to see how Nikki would get from that dark moment in the doctor’s office to this one, carrying a handbag burdened with so many other people’s water bottles. For Nikki, motherhood is a kind of wish-fulfilment, and it’s taken two painful seasons of trying for her to deservedly emerge – finally – as the best mum on TV.
