Nora Holden Walker

Nora Walker is the matriarch of a sprawling, opinionated California family, recently widowed and still arranging flowers for a husband whose secrets are only beginning to surface. She hosts, mediates, and worries over her five grown children with a warmth that borders on interference, determined to keep everyone at her table no matter what.

Sally Field plays Nora as someone whose sunniness is a genuine choice, not a mask, which makes her flashes of anger and grief land harder. The show gives her real stubbornness and political fire alongside the casseroles, and Field never lets the character curdle into a simple nurturer — she's funny, controlling, and fierce in equal measure.