Why Christine Baskets Was One of TV’s Greatest Characters

When Louie Anderson died on Friday, it felt like dozens of moms who I knew and loved all died at once.

That’s because Anderson took with him his portrayal of Christine Baskets, the doting but demanding mother of Zach Galifianakis’s depressive clown in the brilliant, bone-dry comedy “Baskets,” which ran on FX from 2016-19.

For me, Christine is one of the great TV characters, up there with Homer Simpson, Tony and Carmela Soprano or any of the Golden Girls. She was a caricature of a matriarch, but brought complexity and nuance to a type that is usually relegated to sketch comedy, two-dimensional walk-ons or viral videos of monstrous Karens.

As a fat person, as a Midwesterner, and as a drag enthusiast with a folksy middle-aged persona of my own, watching Christine Baskets in all her ridiculousness, nuance, power and covert wisdom was thrilling. It was a portrait of a woman I know and love who has never been presented with such affection and skill on television, before or since.

I spent my first 28 years in suburban Chicago, St. Paul, Minn., and Madison, Wis. The Upper Midwest is home to many people like Christine: strong, sturdy, hardworking women whose cheerfulness was both a personality trait and a strategy to navigate a world that regularly underestimated them.

The women I’m thinking of would hate that description, not just because they’d think of “sturdy” as an offensive euphemism, but because they don’t like taking compliments. (“Hardworking? Me? Please, I’m just trying to get through until Friday!”)

In case you missed “Baskets” (it is currently streaming on Hulu), the show starred Galifianakis as Chip Baskets, a French-trained clown stuck performing at a rodeo in his hometown, Bakersfield, Calif. Chip’s mother, Christine, loves her four sons, has a great recipe for something called “whiskey salad” and refuses to admit that her late husband’s suicide was anything but an accident.

Galifianakis, who was also one of the creators, said on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast that while conceiving the show he imagined Christine speaking in Anderson’s voice, which led to the idea of casting the beloved comic and game show host. While “Baskets” was set in California, the long O’s and nasal A’s of Christine’s accent hail unmistakably from Anderson’s native Minnesota.

Anderson modeled Christine on his own mother, Ora Zella Anderson, a woman he lovingly described as a “passive-aggressive Midwesterner.” His 2018 book, “Hey Mom,” was about lessons he learned from his mother, but you needn’t look further than his “Baskets” performance to see the impact Ora had on him.

Anderson was a man portraying a woman, but he eschewed some of the more well-trodden tropes of drag. This was not Divine in “Hairspray” or “Polyester,” playing a housewife turned up to 11. Anderson’s performance was earthier and more sensitive, but equally impactful.

Christine’s wardrobe — a meticulously realistic selection of…