Yuki Ishii-Peters

Yuki is Maya's mother, a Japanese immigrant navigating suburban American life alongside a daughter who is mortified by almost everything she does. She's affectionate, exasperated, and often bewildered by seventh-grade drama, holding down the household with a mix of warmth and old-world strictness that Maya finds constantly embarrassing.

The casting is the joke and the tenderness at once: Maya Erskine's real mother plays her TV mother, and that lived-in intimacy makes every scolding and every soft moment land with unusual truth. Erskine isn't acting so much as remembering, and the show lets her be funny without ever turning her into a punchline.