Season 1

Recently widowed Edie (Linda Lavin) comes to New York to visit daughter, Jill (Patricia Heaton), who's a morning TV talk show producer. While sitting in the audience, Edie insults the guest, a pretentious fashion designer, and finds herself with a job doing a daily commentary on the show.

Since moving to New York, Edie's been bunking with Jill. With her mother really cramping her style and cutting into her alone time with her boyfriend, Matt, Jill sets out on a mission to find Edie an apartment. Edie, however, is reluctant to dive into a new apartment, but she eventually settles on a gorgeous apartment with a friendly, but extremely eccentric neighbor.

Outraged with programming for sweeps week, Edie improvises during her daily commentary and urges viewers to send a message to network programmers by switching channels during sweeps. This outrages WXOR's management, who warn Jill to gain control of Edie -- and have her plug their progamming. Jill confronts her mom, but Edie won't agree to to endorse their shows. Meanwhile, ""Wake Up, New York""'s hosts sink to new degrading lows in an attempt to gain ratings.

Edie overextends herself and wants to help everyone. For starters, there's Diahnn, who's having problems with Reid. Naomi has the flu and Edie tries to comfort her. Ken needs help labeling his catalogues, so it's Edie to the rescue. Even her mother calls seeking advice. But the one person she can't help is Jill, who was planning a Caribbean vacation with Matt, while he was making plans to break up with her.

Edie's been acting mysteriously cheerful, which leads Jill to suspect that she's sleeping with Ken. So when her mother's mood takes a sudden nosedive, Jill does what any child would do -- she confronts Ken, unaware that there's nothing going on between them. In the meantime, Jill herself is depressed that she has to attend a friend's wedding with no date.

Jill and Edie take a psychology class together, in hopes of broadening their horizons and having some fun in the process. But things don't become fun for Jill, who feels inadequate and becomes competitive when her mother becomes a star pupil.

Jill recieves notification that she and Matt have won and RV in a contest they entered as a joke while they were still dating, so they decide to sell the RV and split the cash. Matt arrives at the office with paperwork, and winds up telling Edie that he misses Jill. So when they see each other again, Jill expects a reconciliation, though it's slow to come. Meanwhile, Ken recieves an annoying self-help book from his sister.