She was the quintessential TV mom.For 14...

She was the quintessential TV mom.

For 14 years, Harriet Nelson played the happy homemaker on “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” television’s longest-running family situation comedy. As Nelson said: “Nobody recognizes me without an apron and a coffee pot in my hand.”

“Today’s mother has a hard time of it,” acknowledged Nelson, who’s now retired and living in Laguna Beach.

“As a matter of fact, my hat’s off to today’s mother. She has to have a coffee pot in her hand while she’s getting ready for work and getting the kids off to school.”

In real life, not even Harriet Nelson matched her home-bound TV image during the show years: She had to “hit the deck” at 6 a.m. and be at the studio by 7. When she returned home at night, the Nelsons’ housekeeper had dinner waiting.

But because they were a real-life family portraying “themselves” on TV each week, many viewers tended to confuse the Nelsons with their television characters.

“The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” which airs on the Disney Channel Monday-Friday at 11 p.m., is actually grounded in a reality of sorts: It began on radio in 1944 as a “day in the life” of bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his vocalist wife, Harriet Hilliard.

In 1949, 12-year-old David and 8-year-old Ricky replaced the child actors who had been portraying them on the popular radio comedy.

By the time the program moved to TV in 1952, it had been years since Ozzie and Harriet had toured with the band, but Ozzie believed that it would be unrealistic if he suddenly had another occupation. So the show never did say where he went during the day-thus giving rise to that most burning of all TV trivia questions: What did Ozzie Nelson do for a living?

Actually, Ozzie Nelson served as both producer and director of the show and, his widow said, “He worked harder than anyone else.”

Like other situation comedies from the ‘50s and ‘60s, “Ozzie and Harriet” has been criticized for not providing a more “realistic” portrayal of American family life.

But, Nelson said, the show was never intended to be that “legit.”

“Our show was an out and out comedy,” she said. “That’s the reason our story lines were nothing heavier than ‘David’s tuxedo is locked in the cleaners and he’s going to the prom that night, and we have to find a way to get that tuxedo out.’ ”

Nelson said she believes that the show appeals to viewers because “the basic stories touched home to everybody. People identified with the family, and the reason they did is because the same things happened to them that we were portraying.”

Nelson acknowledged that families today are vastly different from those in the ‘50s and contemporary family sitcoms must reflect those changes.

But, she said, “it always drives me wacky when people equate our show, or our problems, then and now. That’s silly. We didn’t have the kind of problems then that there are now.

“You know what else drives me crazy is when a critic or someone who is equating us to a show today will call Ozzie a bumbling father. He was not. He was a very intelligent man, and the humor of our show was the fact that these things happened, and he got himself caught in the middle and didn’t know how it happened.”

“I mean,” she added with a laugh, “he was an innocent bystander.”

There’s one more thing that Nelson said drives her “wacky”:

“I’m always being slightly put down for wearing high-heel shoes in the house and a dress. When we did the show, women did not wear blue jeans. And women would rather be caught dead than get caught in a pair of tennis shoes. But I get put down now for it.”

“And,” Nelson added, lifting up a tennis shoe-clad foot and grinning, “they don’t know what I look like now.”