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Lotsa Luck was a one season sitcom that ran from September 1973 until May 1974 on NBC.
Bachelor Stanley Belmont ( Dom Deluise), was the custodeon of the New York City bus company's lost and found department. But it was his home life and not his job that was the source of most of his problems and aggravations. Living with him was his bossy, autocratic mother( Kathleen Freeman ), his klutzy sister Olive (Beverly Sanders), and Olive's unemployed husband Arthur ( Wynn Irwin). The fact that Arthur was perfectly content to live off Stanley's earnings, and did not seem particularly interested in finding a job and moving out of Stanley's home, did not endear him to his brother-in-law. One of Stanley's co-workers, his good friend Bummy ( Jack Knight ), was the only other regular in the cast. One of the most often used phrases on this show came when Mrs. Belmont would say " You're a good boy Stanley," to which Stanley would reply, "You're a pain in the neck Ma." This sitcom was based on the British series On The Busses.
A Review From Time Magazine
LOTSA LUCK. NBC. Monday, 8-8:30 p.m. E.D.T. Archie Bunker has spawned a whole blue-collar barrelful of hopeful imitators, but this one has scraped the bottom. In yet another American translation of an English television comedy, Dom DeLuise is a former bus driver who now mans his company's lost and found department. Whatever he gives at the office, he spends most of his time at home exchanging nastiness with his family of carping harpies. The biggest household joke seems to be the sexual inability of his sullen and slovenly brother-in-law Arthur, although last week Mom's hot flashes and the laxative nature of sister's cooking came in for their share of yucks. NBC announced last week that henceforth there will be more "warmth" written into these plug-uglies, and in an unusual step, aired two segments of the show. One ran in its usual time slot; the second came four days later, following top-rated Sanford and Son, to give all those Sanford fans "a look at the totally new direction the show is taking." Lotsa luck.
Here is Kathleen Freeman's Obituary from The New York Times
Kathleen Freeman, 78, Actress Playing Comic Character Roles
By JESSE MCKINLEY
Published: August 24, 2001
Kathleen Freeman, the veteran character actress whose salty comic talents were most recently on display in the current Broadway musical ''The Full Monty,'' died yesterday at Lenox Hill Hospital. She was 78.
The cause was lung cancer, said Michael Hartman, a publicist for the show.
Ms. Freeman, who had been suffering from the disease for a year, fell ill over the weekend, but only after finishing a two-performance day on Saturday. Her death was announced to the cast yesterday before last evening's performance.
The daughter of a husband-and-wife vaudeville team, Ms. Freeman was literally born into show business, growing up on the song-and-dance circuit. She did her bit to help the act -- she took to the stage for the first time at the age of 2 -- but the family business eventually failed.
Ms. Freeman, however, had already caught the acting bug, a condition that only grew worse when she got a bit part in a play while attending the University of California at Los Angeles to study music. ''A terrible thing happened,'' she said. ''I got a laugh.''
It was to be the first of many. With a jowly face, quizzical eyes and an almost perpetually furrowed brow, Ms. Freeman soon established herself as a nimble character actress, turning her talent for deadpan into a lengthy career.
In the years between her first screen credit (a one-line part in the 1948 noir film, ''The Naked City'') to her last (as the old woman in this year's ''Shrek''), Ms. Freeman would indelibly mark dozens of films in a variety of small but memorable roles.
In ''Singin' in the Rain'' (1952), she was Phoebe Dinsmore, the frustrated vocal coach to a squeaky-voiced bombshell played by Jean Hagen. In ''North to Alaska'' (1960), Ms. Freeman played a drunken Swedish prospector who lambasts a stunned John Wayne. And in a more recent turn she was the avenging nun, Sister Mary Stigmata, opposite John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in ''The Blues Brothers'' (1980).
Perhaps her best-known comic partnership was with Jerry Lewis, with whom she tangled in eight films, including ''The Nutty Professor'' and ''The Ladies' Man.'' She and Mr. Lewis shared a love, she said, ''for clowns and crazy people.''
Generations of television audiences also knew Ms. Freeman's elastic mug. She was a regular on numerous 1960's sitcoms, including ''The Beverly Hillbillies,'' playing Flo Shafer, one of the bumpkins' many nemeses; and ''Hogan's Heroes,'' as Frau Linkmeier, the great love of Colonel Klink.
While she belonged to two prominent Los Angeles theater companies, the Circle and Players Ring Theaters, in the 1940's, Ms. Freeman's Broadway debut did not come until 1978 in Georges Feydeau's ''13 Rue de l'Amour,'' with Louis Jourdan. There, she played Madame Spritzer, a downwardly mobile countess.
It was a performance that Walter Kerr, the theater critic for The New York Times, said exemplified Ms. Freeman's talent for subtle, savage comedy. ''Even in midflight,'' he wrote, ''she has the patience to sit on a line, to isolate it, and nail it to the floor.''
Though she toured with several other productions, she only returned to Broadway last fall in ''The Full Monty,'' playing Jeanette Burmeister, a tough-talking, tough-loving pianist. Her entrance, lurching up from behind a piano at the end of Act I, was typically one of the biggest ovations of the night.
In June that performance was recognized with a Tony nomination, an honor she described as ''a hoot.'' She didn't win, but she said she didn't care.
In a interview in January, Ms. Freeman described how she felt about her career and life.
''I think,'' she said, ''I'm a living example of the fact that you don't have to be in every inch of a film or play to be important to it.''
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