Sitcom Deaths and Disappearances | Reviving a Mobit

In honor of the anniversary of the first-ever sitcom broadcast on a U.S. television network (fun fact: it was "Mary Kay and Johnny" back in November 1947), we're revisiting "Sitcom Deaths and Disappearances." Characters on sitcoms aren't supposed to die. So when they do, it's never less than weird.…

Literary Frontierswoman: Laura Ingalls Wilder

This special episode comes from the audiobook edition of ROCTOGENARIANS, a brand-new collection of stories from Mo Rocca that celebrates the triumphs of people who made their biggest marks late in life. Chances are, you know something about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. If, like sixty million …

LaWanda Page: Death of a Comedy Queen

Long before her turn as the sermonizing Aunt Esther on "Sanford and Son," LaWanda Page was dazzling Black nightclub audiences - first as the flame-swallowing “Bronze Goddess of Fire”. Then, following in the footsteps of her childhood friend and eventual costar Redd Foxx, she became a queen of raunc…

Revisiting the Orphan Train: An American Odyssey

Between 1854 and 1929, 250,000 orphans and abandoned children were placed on East Coast city trains and sent west to live with new families. A desperate solution to a desperate problem, some of the stories turned out well and some far from well. The remarkable stories of these riders live on throug…

Death of a Sports Team: Satchel Paige and Los Dragones

There’s no shortage of sports teams that change cities or names over the course of their franchise history. But what about the teams that just cease to exist? Perhaps no team story packs more drama into one year of existence than that of Los Dragones de Ciudad Trujillo. It’s a story that combines o…

Death of the Very Special Episode

If you were a kid watching TV in the 1980s and 1990s, you probably saw a fair number of “Very Special Episodes,” when the usual blissful bubble of the sitcom world was punctured by real-world issues for a half-hour. Drugs, drinking and driving, stranger danger, even AIDS. But never fear, all would …

Mobits Extra: How Norman Lear Changed Television

Starting in the early 1970s, Norman Lear changed the face of television, fusing comedy with social commentary. Lear died on December 5th at the great old age of 101. Mo revisits their 2015 conversation for CBS Sunday Morning.

The Habsburg Jaw: Death of a Dynasty

For centuries European royals married only each other. It was believed to be the best way of consolidating power. But rampant royal inbreeding had increasingly negative consequences––including genetic abnormalities (like the protuberant “Habsburg Jaw”), the dying off of whole lines, and eventually …

Death of a Nepo Baby

“Nepo Baby” is a term popularly used to describe the celebrity children of celebrity parents. But family connections affect every field of work, and always have. And where family is involved, so is drama. Mo tells the stories of three of history’s biggest Nepo Babies: Edsel Ford, the son of Henry F…

JFK Impersonator Vaughn Meader: Death of a Career

November 22, 2023, marks 60 years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the end of one of the era's biggest comedy acts. During Kennedy's term, Vaughn Meader’s impersonation of the president made him a household name. The comedy album "The First Family,” in which Meader uncannily…