Jaime Pressly is pushing back gently on the latest noise around Mom, saying she spent seven wonderful years with an incredible cast of women after Chuck Lorre revived debate over Anna Faris’ exit. Speaking to E! News at the Alice + Olivia breast cancer event on Oct. 16, Pressly said the show was defined less by controversy than by the women who carried it through eight seasons.
Pressly said she joined Mom in its second season and stayed for seven years, working alongside what she called an incredible crew and an incredible cast of women. She singled out Allison Janney, Mimi Kennedy and Beth Hall, and said the appeal of the job was simple: she got to go to work with girlfriends every day. In her telling, the set was full of people who were, like the characters they played, “just as beautifully flawed.”
The remarks land while Lorre’s memoir Sitcom is still driving conversation about the show’s ending. In the book, he says Faris’ departure in 2020 validated his doubts about casting her in the first place and writes that after six years she left for “mysterious reasons” that were not mysterious to anyone on the show. Faris answered on Instagram on Oct. 15, saying the comments hurt but that Lorre gave her a job she loved, that she never took those seven years for granted and that she was proud of what they made together.
That response matters because it puts two versions of Mom side by side. Lorre describes a cast decision he came to question; Pressly describes a workplace she loved; Faris describes a job that mattered to her, even as she said she had been sober for a year and a half and was now healthy, working and happier than she had been in a long time. The unresolved question is not whether Mom worked — Pressly’s memory of it makes that plain — but what exactly drove Faris to leave in 2020, and why Lorre felt compelled to re-litigate it now.
Pressly also used the moment to praise her current work, saying she had the best time on All’s Fair and calling Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts and Sarah Paulson some of the sweetest, most generous women. But her strongest comments stayed with Mom, where she framed the cast not as a behind-the-scenes problem but as a group of women who made the long run feel like a gift.
