Jaime Pressly comments on Mom cast with a direct defense of the women she worked beside, saying she spent seven wonderful years on the series after Chuck Lorre’s memoir remarks about Anna Faris. Speaking on Oct. 16 at the Alice + Olivia breast cancer event, Pressly framed the show as a working relationship built around an ensemble rather than one name on the call sheet.
Pressly’s seven years on Mom
"I was there for seven years, but there [were] eight seasons," Pressly said, adding that she "came on in the second season" and spent "seven wonderful years of working with an incredible crew and an incredible cast of women, who were, all of us, just as beautifully flawed as our characters on the show were." That timeline matters because her run covered most of Mom, even if she did not start with the series at the beginning.
Pressly singled out Allison Janney, Mimi Kennedy and Beth Hall as part of what made the job work, and she said, "I think I just really thoroughly enjoyed being able to go to work with girlfriends every day." She added, "All of us of a certain age, it was nice. It was refreshing."
Lorre’s memoir line
The friction comes from Lorre in his memoir Sitcom, where he wrote, "I wasn’t sure Anna would be appropriate for this kind of material," and later added, "As the years went by, it became apparent that my initial reluctance to hire Anna was, in fact, correct." He also wrote, "After six years, she left the show for mysterious reasons that were not mysterious to anyone on the show."
Faris pushed back on Oct. 15, saying, "Of course it hurts," before adding, "Chuck gave me a job I loved, and for seven years I never took a day of it for granted. I'm proud of what we made together, and nothing changes how grateful I am for those people and those years." Her response kept the dispute focused on the gap between a creator’s retrospective criticism and a cast member’s lived experience.
Allison Janney, Mimi Kennedy and Beth Hall
Pressly’s comments do more than defend her own time on Mom; they shift the public record back toward the working ensemble around Christy Plunkett and Jill Kendall. By naming Allison Janney, Mimi Kennedy and Beth Hall, she treated the series as a group effort, not a single casting debate, and that is the sharpest rebuttal to Lorre’s memoir language without turning the exchange into a full feud.
The practical takeaway is simple: Pressly is not echoing the memoir’s criticism, and Faris is not walking away from the series’ legacy. For anyone tracking the split in tone, the cleanest read is that one memoir chapter reopened an old argument, while the cast member who spoke next chose to defend the years of work instead of the grievance.
