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Yeah.
My guest tonight is the creator and star of the hit Netflix comedy series Working Moms. Please welcome my good friend Katherine Wrightman.
Oh my gosh, I.
Look at this. So Catherine and I met how many years ago?
Just a few two.
We're so young and lee fresh and young. We met doing a hidden camera prank show. That's right that I believe NBC called their worst primetime ratings in history something like that. I think they might have said that. Yeah, yeah, but you know what.
We say that about all the shows. We were very special.
We really were.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we really were. And this was my first big break, the real wedding crashers, and I think it was yours too. We cut our teeth together.
We did for ten weeks in Vegas, and we somehow made it out alive. I don't know how.
I mean, by the skin of her teeth. I slapped a bitch slapped me, true Tristorian, true tried bride who was in on it, just five fingered me right across the front.
Yeah, yeah, that was a rough day. We didn't we couldn't even afford a medic The budget was so low. You just had to like granted and held a coke can to my cheek. And now has that ever happened on Working Moms?
God slapped?
Yeah right.
Danny Kind, who plays and on the show, loves to slap a bit. She'll get in there. She's very physical. I love her for it. I love it.
Oh my god? So you, I mean, you're you're one of those actors who has always been the total standout and everything that you've been in, you're so damn funny. You're constantly working steal every scene. But now suddenly there's this baby of your seven seasons.
Isn't that crazy?
Of Working Moms?
Oh my?
Eighty three episodes.
Yep dropping on Netflix this Wednesday, April.
You created it, you star in it, you direct it, you executive produce it. What is it like seeing your baby all grown.
Up like that? It's wild? You know. I mean, I entered the show thinking it'll probably get one season and I'll just try to be as authentic as I can tell all my stories, cram it into one season, and each season that we got picked up for another one, I was in disbelief. I still am.
It's so good, it's so funny and genuinely I know you. You're a friend like it feels like you. You can tell that you put so much of yourself into it. You cover just in this. I may have snuck a few episodes of this last season because I got a friend, got a hook I got a hook up.
Don't be asking me.
And just in just in this season, you explore so many themes and issues that are so important. You have an entire storyline on the male birth control pill.
That's right.
Yeah, you explore uh, destigmatizing in female sexuality, marriage ruts, the complexities of female friendships. How do you get ideas for these stories?
I guess I just live, you know what I mean?
Yeah, just a day in the life of a woman.
I mean, and I'm sure your audience can speak to this. It's like having a kid, And I mean just watching this incredible show tonight and seeing all the horrifying statistics of what it means to go back to work, knowing that you're going to be looked at differently for being
a mother was so paralyzingly terrifying to me. I didn't even know I had postpartum depression when I started the show, and getting through it out a three month old when we started shooting, and when we wrapped the show and I all of a sudden realized, like I feel like I white knuckled through it, Like I don't think I took a breath until they said cut the last time.
Yeah, and that was part of the inspiration for the show, right you having gone through that and thinking like there aren't shows out there that really dive into these topics.
There sure are more now. Seven years ago it was a wasteland. I mean I couldn't find any a storyline, meaning the main plot point of the show about a woman who happened to be a mother and work. I mean, look on Work and Moms. The actual amount of time where you see the female characters with their kids is like five percent. This is about women being something outside of the nursery. It's a woman in the workplace show.
And yeah, they've got to juggle it all and try to have it all, whether that's possible or not.
Do you think it's possible?
Yeah? Right, at all?
You can have it all, but not all At the same time, I said, what's wise said, it's a different.
For each person, right, we all have our ways of sort of working it out of making sacrifices. The guilt is real.
Guilt is real. Guilt is really said something about mom guilt that really stuck with me.
You you sounds like, yeah, very profound.
You said something in regards to the way that you talk to your children about going to work.
Yeah, I don't say I have to go to work. I get to go to work. And I just flip that tone. I go, like, before I flew to New York to do this lovely thing with you, I told my kids, I'm so excited you guys. I've never gotten to do this sort of thing. I'm so happy with it. And they feel the joy rating off of me. And then tonight they were like, we're so excited for you. And that shift's great.
That's so beautiful because you are following your passion and you're clearly meant to do this, and you bring so much joy to so many people, and you're teaching them that they can one day do that too, and that's really important. That's really powerful.
Or marry a woman that takes care of them.
Yes, yes, yeah, also wonderful, so very powerful. You work with your husband I do show. He plays your actual husband. He also is an executive producer. And directs on the show. How how does this work? Because there was a very brief time during the pandemic when we were filming from home and I one time asked my husband to hold the camera and we almost got divorced.
How do you navigate that it's triggy? I mean, we've definitely had some serious fights. There's a but then you also find ways. I mean, look for those of us who work in separate places on our husbands or wives. You get to come home and try to share what happened, and there's sort of like a lack of connection because you can't talk about what you've done. When I get home, Phil knows exactly what I've done, right, He witnessed all my wins, but he also witnesses when I fail, so
that makes it really complicated. Lucky for me, I got a guy who's a serious cheerleader, you know, he's yeah, he's had my back. It was his idea to push me into writing this thing in the first place.
So thanks Phil, You're lucky to have each other. You're lucky to have each other. I am. I am so grateful for you making this show because I finally feel like there's a show where Working Moms are seen, and it means a great deal to me. And it's such a joy to see you do your thing and shine your light because you are just You're a total inspiration. So I'm really happy for you and I'm proud of that I get to be your friend.
Can I return the favor real quick? That? Oh? How amazing is it that we broke our teeth on the first Real Wed and Crasher show, which was a hit. Maybe not, but it was really real critical darling, Yeah, totally, we were doing some really cool stuff. They're actually but yeah, I get to now witness your first night hosting the Daily Show.
Thank you, Thank you for being. I love you to be, I really do. Thank you. You can watch the seven season and the final season of Working Moms on April twenty six on Netflix. If you're wondering why I'm in bed having cold eggs, burnt bacon, and a pancake filled
with jelly beans, then you've never celebrated Mother's Day. It's that special day each year when your husband gives you flowers he bought in a panic at the gas station, and a CARDI wrote with his feet so it looks like your dumbest kid did it, But societies have been honoring mothers since ancient times, including all the way back in ancient Egypt, where an annual festival honored the mother of all pharaohs. Isis, No, not the one that you're thinking.
Isis was an Egyptian goddess and style and spo for every white girl at Coachella. The Greeks and Romans also had spring festivals celebrating the Great Mother. The Greeks called her Rehea, who's usually depicted with a mural crown seated in a chariot pulled by two lions, which is badass and carbon neutral. We should bring that back. But what we know to me Mother's Day really traces back to eighteen fifty two and a woman named Anne Reeves Jarvis.
She started something called Mother's Day Work Clubs, where women in the community would help needy families buy medicine, get clean water, and practice safe sewage disposal, which is pretty intense as far as mom groups go. The one I'm in mostly just swaps hand me down Elmo Onesie's for weed. After Anne Reeves Jarvis died, her daughter Anna Jarvis, decided
to honor her. In nineteen oh eight, she organized the first official Mother's Day celebration in Philadelphia, with the help of department store owner John Wannamaker handing out hundreds of white carnations because her mother loved them, even though, let's be honest, they're kind of the basic bitch of flowers. And because the day was so successful, Jarvis lobby to have the holiday honoring mothers added to the national calendar. She led a letter writing campaign to newspapers, politicians, and
the governors of every state. Now this was before two, so she couldn't do that thing where you just tag a bunch of important people and retweet yourself. It didn't work, by the way. After years of pushing and fighting and writing, Jarvis's dream was realized when President Woodrow Wilson finally made Mother's Day a national holiday in nineteen fourteen. It was the best thing to happen to mothers until the invention of white zinfidel. But guess what. Once Mother's Day became
an official holiday, Anna Jarvis hated it. She thought her sincere holiday had become a commercialized racket and called the florist and greeting card manufacturers Charlatan's bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements and celebrations, which basically sounds like how William Shakespeare would give a one star Yelp review. Jarvis hated the holidays so much that it
soon became her life's work. To undo her life's work, she went door to door collecting petitions to take Mother's Day off the calendar. She threatened people who use the phrase Mother's Day with copyright infringement. She got in a fight with Eleanor Roosevelt for using Mother's Day to raise money for charity, and one time, when a waitress told her to enjoy her Mother's Day salad, Jarvis threw the salad on the ground. It's true. You can google it,
although don't search for mother Tass's salad. Those are not the results you want. I'm trying to get it off the dark web. Oh you saw it, Yeah, thank you. But basically, Anna Jarvis brought Mother's Day into this world and ever since it was an endless source of disappointment and frustration in her life, which ironically is a pretty perfect metaphor for motherhood anyway. That is why we celebrate
Mother's Day. Now, if you don't mind, I'm gonna try to enjoy this abomination of a breakfast hm, HM Licorice, Jellybean.
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