playing Marta Hansen, Peggy Wood was honored with her first Emmy nomination as best actress in a drama series. Her first nomination was for her work on Mama during the 1952–1953 television season. (The series itself was nominated in 1951 for Best Dramatic Show.) It was during this season that the orchestral accordionist John Serry Sr. collaborated with Peggy Wood on the show. Even though she did not win on the night of the 1956–57 Emmy Awards, in admiration for the long-running success of Mama and the great affection the public felt for Wood, the Television Academy asked her to present the last award of the evening: Best Single Program of the Year, which went to Playhouse 90's Requiem for a Heavyweight. In the fall of 1957, the complete 1956–57 filmed season of Mama aired on New York's WPIX-TV Channel 11. However, as the live (kinescoped) episodes are largely lost, Mama is unfamiliar to later generations of viewers. The aforementioned 26 filmed episodes from the last season of the show have occasionally been screened on public access stations. In 1985, the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City presented a retrospective of Mama by arranging screenings of several of the live television broadcasts (1949–56), which had been donated by various sources, as well as a seminar featuring the three actors who played the Hansen children - Rosemary Rice (Katrin), Dick Van Patten (Nels), Robin Morgan (Dagmar) - and longtime director, Ralph Nelson. The Museum also discovered all 26 episodes of the filmed season of Mama (1956–57) in a CBS storage facility in New Jersey; not only did these episodes become part of the screening exhibition, but they were also added to the Museum's collection. Rice donated several kinescopes she kept from the show for the exhibition. The opening and closing musical pieces were the "Holberg Suite" and "The Last Spring" by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. Director-producer Ralph Nelson, himself of Norwegian descent, went on to direct the film Lilies of the Field. Awards The series received three Emmy nominations: one in 1951 for Best Dramatic Show and two for Peggy Wood's performance in 1953 and 1957. RatingsMama was one of the first TV sitcoms to consistently finish in the Nielsen ratings' top 30 after they were instituted in the 1950–1951 season: 1950–1951: #10 1951–1952: #11 1952–1953: #18 1953–1954: #26 In the 1954–1955 seasons and afterward, Mama'' was not in