YMMV / My Mother the Car

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Easily one of the most notorious cases of this in television history. Even in an era where other sitcoms featured gimmicks like a talking horse, a witch living as a common housewife, a female genie obedient to (and trying to be hidden from everyone by) the astronaut who found her, or a flying nun, a show about a talking car (and one who talks because its owner's mother reincarnated into it at that) was found to be too preposterous a premise, resulting in its infamy. One contemporary critic noted that television was used to talking animals like Mr. Ed, and ghosts coming back to haunt the living as the premise of a sitcom in Topper, but the combination of both gimmicks (with a car instead of an animal) in one show struck as ludicrous.
• Bile Fascination: Perhaps the only reason the show is still remembered. The series is remembered for having a premise considered horrible... but people still want to see how horrible it is.
• Fridge Horror: In addition to the below Paranoia Fuel, the fact that Mother came back as a car provides a horrific thought: she explains that she didn't get to decide what she came back as which resulted in her coming back as a car. That means any man-made object could potentially be housing a reincarnated soul. And worse than that, what happens to cars and household items that break, that can't be repaired? They get thrown away (in a car's case, either left sitting in the backyard to rust or worse, taken to a junkyard). Until the item was destroyed, the souls trapped in them would be in the non-functioning items with no way to relieve the passing of time.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Mother refuses to talk to anyone else besides Dave because she's afraid she would be put on display in the Smithsonian Institute, or on "...the Johnny Carson show." The show would be the subject of much ridicule from Carson.
  • A series about a talking, near-indestructible car that can drive itself? Knight Rider would do a similar concept but far more successfully about 15 years later... on the same network, no less!
• Paranoia Fuel: While the show wasted a lot of opportunities by only having mother talk to Dave, her reasons for doing so make sense—if everyone knew the car was alive, she would be either stuck on public display or studied endlessly by curious parties (who would probably have her dismantled, which could be potentially fatal). Keeping quiet was a self-preservation move.
• Poor Man's Substitute: No offense to Jerry Van Dyke, but he does seem to be playing the same sort of character his brother played in The Dick Van Dyke Show. Trying to avoid this may have even been partly responsible for a major change in the appearance of Maggie Pierce, the actress who played his character's wife on the show, after Jerry Van Dyke compared her in an interview to Mary Tyler Moore (who played his brother Dick's wife on Dick's show) and who happened to have shoulder-length brunette hair similar to Moore's, as she would sport a blond bouffant style in the show (though the director claimed that the change was because her dark brunette hair didn't show up well in color).
• So Bad, It's Good: The show is simply too bizarre to pass up.
• So Okay, It's Average: Wild premise aside, the majority of it is just kind of bland and doesn't really do much with said premise. This is largely due to many episodes barely using Mother outside of one brief scene, making many episodes into standard era sitcom fare. Critics noted that while other comical fantasy shows often had whimsy or eccentric characters to compliment their premise, the Crabtree family was blandly normal.
• Spiritual Successor: It was practically Mister Ed but with a car instead of a horse.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Quite a few more gag and story opportunities would have been opened up if Manzini also knew about the car being possessed. Instead, Mother gets no one to work off except Dave, which got old by the end of the pilot.
• Values Dissonance: Besides the fact that it's a '60s sitcom, it's a little strange to see a classic, vintage automobile treated like The Alleged Car rather than a museum piece. Dave acts a little similar to an enthusiast, at least.

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