Nobody Elevates the White Suburban Mom Trope Quite Like Connie Britton

Connie Britton has been playing mothers for decades, but don’t mistake the now-54-year-old actress for a victim of typecasting. Yes, many of her mom roles share demographic markers (white, blonde, suburban, wealthy, likely to shame you over your inadequate contribution to the PTA bake sale), but Britton’s dazzling yet somehow restrained acting talents make each of her characters distinct. After all, you’d never mistake Nashville’s faded country-music diva Rayna James for American Horror Story: Murder House’s terrified, grieving, stay-at-home mom Vivien, or The White Lotus’s narcissistic, cancel-culture-decrying girlboss Nicole Mossbacher. In many ways, she’s in a league of her own. 

To be clear, many of Britton’s mom characters aren’t remotely heroines; on the contrary, they’re textbook Karens, more concerned with finding Wi-Fi access on vacation or yelling at the maid for misplacing their riding boots than actually getting to know the people in their homes—both family and staff—as human beings. On the short-lived yet memorable Showtime series SMILF, Britton’s Ally—the neglected wife of an unseen rich guy—could have been a cliché, but the depth Britton brought to the role transformed Ally into an actual person with needs and wants of her own (which, of course, made her treatment of the people around her all the worse, subtly reminding viewers that you can harbor good intentions and still behave like a rich, clueless nightmare).

On The White Lotus, Nicole complains about the lack of sympathy afforded to “straight, white young men,” seemingly unaware of how desperately out-of-touch she sounds. The part is certainly a departure from Britton’s days as Tami Taylor on the smash-hit NBC series *Friday Night Lights—*when her main job (at least in the show’s early days) was to be a sweetness-and-light-radiating sounding board to the swoon-worthy Coach Taylor—but Britton is gifted with enough range to pull off privileged obliviousness as well as preternatural warmth. Her onscreen persona is at once homey and mildly intimidating, and can turn on a dime from “likable neighbor” to “classmate’s mom you hate” while imbuing each role with enough meaning to ward off any accusations of superficiality. Tami Taylor was a sweetheart, sure, but not the kind you’d want to mess with; ditto Rayna, ditto Vivien, and—as Alexandra D’Addario’s character Rachel on The White Lotus quickly learned in a recent episode—especially ditto Nicole.

The societal role of upper-class white mothers like The White Lotus’s Nicole and SMILF’s Ally has been given a thorough literary examination of late in novels like Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age and J. Courtney Sullivan’s Friends and Strangers; both contrast those selfsame mothers against the young women they employ to watch their children, leaving the reader with the distinct impression that their lives and intentions aren’t quite as rosy as their manicured suburban lawns or carefully pruned Instagram accounts would have you believe. Britton excels in this kind of role precisely because she neither overdoes the theatrics nor pulls any of her punches—allowing viewers to alternately root for her (at least a little bit) and occasionally hate her guts. To render women like these accurately is to begin to investigate what it means to be a certain kind of white woman—and, more specifically, a certain kind of white mother—in America, and it’s difficult to imagine uprooting the deep systemic privilege that is so frequently afforded to this kind of person when she’s only understood in the most narratively convenient, stereotypical terms.

In real life, Britton is a single mom to one son—Eyob “Yoby” Britton, 10, whom Britton adopted from Ethiopia in 2011—and her parenting experience likely looks pretty different from that of, say, Tami Taylor or Nicole Mossbacher. (On an episode of Watch What Happens Live, Britton discussed beginning her journey as a mother shortly after the deaths of her own parents, saying, “In truth, both of my parents had passed away within three years, and suddenly I was like, ‘Oh, no. My family is no more.’”) Britton’s upcoming projects include a pandemic-themed miniseries and a film adaptation of Jessica Knoll’s novel Luckiest Girl Alive, but one hopes she’ll someday have the chance to take role that moves a little further from the queen-bee trope, and hews closer to her own experience. Odds are, if she ever does, her performance will be eminently worth watching.