But there had been talk at the network that the Fran character should be Italian instead of Jewish, though it was coming on the heels of Seinfeld. Fran is Jewish in that New York Reform Jewish way that I recognize from my own life and upbringing. Fran and her family are exceedingly close and bickering is their love language. Fran tosses around Yiddish words with an ease familiar to my Jewish friends and family, myself included, and she eats bacon but mentions fasting on Yom Kippur. Fran did too.” Fran wasn’t the only prominent Jewish woman in ’90s television, of course: Will and Grace had Grace Adler Friends had Monica Geller (Courteney Cox) and Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston) Buffy the Vampire Slayer had Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan).īut there was something special and uniquely Jewish about Nanny Fine. The joke was meant to wink at The Nanny’s Jewish viewers, as if to say, “We know you got drunk for the first time on Manischewitz during Passover. The show didn’t care that someone who had never met a Jewish person before wouldn’t get the joke it wasn’t for them, and it didn’t have to be. It might be the most boldly Jewish joke I’ve ever seen on a sitcom, especially one from that era. One joke in particular remains seared into my childhood memory: Fran is on a date and her date asks if she wants “red or white” wine, to which she nasally responds “Blueberry?” and he produces a bottle of Manischewitz. Drescher and her then-husband, Peter Marc Jacobson, created, wrote, and produced the show and their shared background as Jewish high-school sweethearts in Queens gave the show a verisimilitude that can only be born from lived experience.Īnd though “verisimilitude” might not be the first word you’d assign to a show whose lead actor mugs for the camera only slightly less than Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, The Nanny feels grounded in reality, especially when it comes to the Jewishness of Fran and the rest of the Fines. As in many sitcoms, The Nanny’s comedy is derived from the clash of cultures, and Fran’s Jewishness and gefilte-fish-out-of-water (oy, forgive me) role in the Sheffield household is at its center. The Sheffields are rich, WASP-y, and, as both Fran and I put it, fancy-shmancy. The Nanny follows Fran, a working-class Jewish woman from Queens, as she serendipitously lands a gig nannying the three children of Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy), a British widower and Broadway producer. And indeed, on my binge-rewatch of The Nanny, I found that she’s even more Jewish than I remembered. But the character most often cited by people who responded to my query was Fran Fine. These pre-2000 characters included Molly Goldberg (Gertrude Berg) on The Goldbergs (1949-1956), Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper) on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, and Grace Adler (Debra Messing) on Will and Grace. Maisel, and Ilana Wexler (Ilana Glazer) and Abbi Abrams (Abbi Jacobson) on Broad City-or with only a handful of Jewish female characters from before 2000. My Jewish and non-Jewish friends alike replied either with characters from the past 10 years-characters such as Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Miriam Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) on The Marvelous Mrs.
#The nanny house tv
In an unscientific Facebook poll, I asked about the most memorable Jewish female TV characters this yielded a pretty narrow range of responses. Harold Hooper (Will Lee) on Sesame Street, Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld) on Seinfeld, and Krusty the Clown (Dan Castellaneta) on The Simpsons-Jewish women were even rarer. And though there were some memorable male Jewish TV characters before the ’90s-Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bernie Steinberg (David Birney) on Bridget Loves Bernie, Mr. Jewish television characters have historically been outliers. I decided to revisit a few episodes to see if it held up after 20 years-and, more specifically, to confirm that the show was as Jewish as I remembered it being.Īs a Jewish girl growing up in the ‘90s, I didn’t get to see a lot of representation of Jewish women on television.
#The nanny house series
The sitcom aired on CBS from 1993 to 1999, and HBO Max began streaming the series in April 2021. My hair is flat, but otherwise I could be the teenage version of the fictional Fran Fine (Fran Drescher) of The Nanny, a New York–raised Reform Jew with a penchant for glittery clothing and funky accessories, who could regularly be found sitting atop a plastic-slipcovered couch in Queens. I’m wearing a black t-shirt with the word “Sagittarius” emblazoned across it in red glitter, a black choker bedazzled with rhinestones, and a pair of cat-eye glasses. I’m sitting on a brocade sofa covered with a clear vinyl couch protector at a family friend’s house in East Elmhurst, Queens. Recently, I came across a photo of myself as a teenager in the late ’90s.
![the nanny house the nanny house](https://www.nannykateandco.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/nannykate-headshot.jpg)
Fran Drescher as Fran Fine in The Nanny (Photo credit: CBS)