Sophia Petrillo

Sophia is Dorothy's tiny, sharp-tongued mother, newly arrived in Miami after a fire closed her nursing home. She moves in with the household uninvited and immovable, dispensing brutal Sicilian wisdom, outrageous stories about the old country, and one-liners aimed squarely at her daughter's ego. Purse in hand, she says whatever she thinks, whenever she thinks it.

The joke is that Estelle Getty was younger than Bea Arthur playing her mother, and she sells the age gap through sheer force of delivery rather than makeup alone. Sophia's stroke-loosened filter lets the show land its cruelest, funniest lines through a character too old, by her own logic, to care what anyone thinks.