(Mis)remembering Sitcoms, Volume 1

Like most millennials, I was practically raised by my television. Unlike a lot of millennials, most of the shows I watched when I was young were “classics,” quite often sitcoms on Nick at Nite and, later, TV Land. Good or bad, I had hundreds and hundreds of hours stuffed into my brain throughout my life and, boy, that’ll give you some opinions, but it’ll also leave you with a lot of blurry, half-baked memories as well. Not all those shows stick to your brain the same way.

For example, Growing Pains. Last week, I started out my e-mail about meeting your heroes with an anecdote from Growing Pains and listed some of the random facts I remembered about it, even though so many specifics have been lost to time. One reader replied saying that he was really excited when he started reading it, because he too loved a lot of strange old sitcoms when he was growing up. I had to admit, I had had just as much fun revisiting Growing Pains myself, and with all those other sitcoms brewing around in my brain, I thought it might be a fun exercise to see what random bits of information I remember about other “classic” sitcoms.

So that’s what I decided to do. The rest of this email contains my quick takes on 22 older sitcoms that I grew up on, from the 50s through the early 2000s. While I went back and fact checked some of these after writing, every bit of information I wrote here was already in my brain, somewhere. I had a ton of fun doing this and definitely want to do a volume 2, so unless you all absolutely hate this idea, expect to see that within the next couple of weeks.

(And on that note, did you guys know these emails have comments? Feel free to leave one on any of these pieces, I love hearing from you!)

Anyway, since I’ve already brought up Growing Pains a few times, let’s start from there:

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GROWING PAINS

I already spoke about most of what I remember from Growing Pains in that previous email I linked to above, but one other notable fact is that for much of the series’ run there was a supporting character, Mike’s dumb-as-rocks best friend, named Boner. Boner. Somebody had to know. They eventually wrote Boner off by having him join the army, and I vividly remember the last Boner joke, how he’d been running three miles every day to train, “but the hard part is running the three miles back once I’m done.”

What I remember far more vividly than Growing Pains is the E! True Hollywood Story episode covering it, because apparently this show was chaos. I believe the creator eventually got pushed off the show because he only cared about Mike as a character, and the writers had to force him out to develop the rest of the cast. The actor who played Ben, Jeremy Miller, had voiced Linus in a Peanuts special so they decided to incorporate his scream from the special into Ben’s character. Kirk Cameron, who played Mike, became born again halfway through the series, and forced the show to fire the actress who played his love interest (the characters were engaged at the time) because she’d once done a shoot for Playboy. Several seasons later he threw a fit when Mike was shown to have a key to his new girlfriend’s apartment. I mentioned this in the previous newsletter, but it’s so awful that it bears repeating — the show made so many fat jokes about Carol that it gave her actress, Tracy Gold, an actual eating disorder, and she missed filming most of the last season because she was in the hospital.

Also, the actress hired to play the Seavers’ baby daughter in the final seasons, Ashley Johnson, eventually grew up to voice Terra on Teen Titans.

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FAMILY TIES

This was one that went completely over my head as a kid, despite my loving Michael J. Fox over in Back to the Future, a film I watched relentlessly around the same time. I caught a few episodes in my twenties and remember laughing at a joke from the character Mallory, and my dad suddenly piping up from the other room “You’re not supposed to laugh at Mallory!” as if that’s the one magic rule of watching Family Ties. Anyway, in retrospect it’s wild that a show with the premise “hot-shot republican teenager gets into hijinks” lasted as long as it did. I don’t think this would fly today. Or if it did, it would have a budget of two dollars and star Kirk Cameron and Roseanne Barr.

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THE BRADY BUNCH

Brady Bunch was one of my favorites on the Nick at Nite line-up as a kid, but as an adult, I think the most interesting thing about it is the unexpected expanded universe it created. There’s of course the made-for-television movie, where Jan and Marsha have a double wedding in the living room of the iconic Brady house, but that spun-off directly into The Brady Brides, a short lived sequel that followed Jan, Marsha, and their husbands attempting to live under the same roof. In the 90s came The Bradys, which attempted to apply the Brady’s sitcom life to an hour long drama, featuring storylines like Bobby getting paralyzed in a race car accident and Marsha overcoming her alcoholism in the space of a single episode. Neither show lasted more than a season. And this isn’t even touching their variety series or animated spin-offs. I’m not sure what it is about the Bradys that creates this fervor for new content, but never enough quality or support to maintain it, but it’s fascinating.

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GILLIGAN’S ISLAND

My parents have been watching this a lot lately, and every single time it’s on I have to stop myself from saying “spoiler alert: they don’t get off the island in this one.” It’s the worst joke in the world but it just bubbles up in my head like the world’s dumbest intrusive thought every time they watch it.

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DENNIS THE MENACE

The design for this show (and I’m talking about the 50s live action sitcom, not any of the more recent movies) always upset me. Dennis in the comics is kinda short and chubby while the actor playing Dennis in the show is tall and thin. Also, everybody else in the show, even the kids, wears realistic clothes while Dennis is in the same grubby overalls every single episode. He looks like he’s doing a bad Dennis the Menace cosplay! I swear that kid had to be fourteen years old by the end of the series, still playing eight. Plus, Dennis wasn’t even much of a menace, just a normal kid; Mr. Wilson brought all his problems on himself by being a schemer or dishonest. It’s a formula that got old fast, and this show got on my nerves.

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I LOVE LUCY/THE LUCY-DESI COMEDY HOUR:

This was my favorite show growing up, and one I still try to catch reruns of if I happen to see them on. I don’t think that I really need to explain why, unless you’ve been living under a rock the past seventy years. There’s plenty about the show that’s dated, but Lucille Ball was such a gifted physical comedian, and all four of the primary cast had an excellent rapport and were given strong jokes to work with. It could tug the heartstrings when it wanted to but mainly just delivered jokes, and it was great at it. It’s also hard to understate how groundbreaking I Love Lucy was. It made Ball the head of her own television network. It was the first television show to depict pregnancy, and featured a marriage between a white woman and a Cuban man in the 1950s of all times. It also invented the very concept of reruns, when shows prior had been destroying their episodes after air. No other show on this list would exist if not for I Love Lucy.

Here’s a fun fact: After I Love Lucy went off the air, it continued on in the form of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, thirteen one hour stories starring the cast and characters of I Love Lucy and a celebrity guest star or two. One episode featured them going to Japan, and it was the only episode Nick at Nite never seemed to air when I was growing up, so catching it kind of became my holy grail — especially since it aired so late I that had to tape it on our VCR, and never knew which episode it would be until the next day. I remember being underwhelmed when I finally saw it and it ended up being just another perfectly fine episode.

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THE LUCY SHOW/HERE’S LUCY

So, yeah, Lucille Ball was a comedy genius, but these two shows are proof of how important Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, and William Frawley were to I Love Lucy — the magic just isn’t there without all four of them. The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy were Ball’s spotlight television shows throughout the sixties and seventies, and their very longevity means I can’t necessarily call them bad, but they’re not great either. Ball is still Ball, but nothing else about these shows sticks. There was a constant turnover in terms of premise and supporting casts, none of which had any real character; they were just there to react to Lucy. As the world’s preeminent eight-year-old Lucille Ball expert, I wanted to love these shows so much, but they mostly just confused me. I didn’t know who anybody was besides Lucy, and the shows didn’t seem to care as long as someone was there for her to play off. I would watch these as a kid but secretly not like them, but I was too embarrassed to admit it.

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ALF

A few months back, the topic of ALF somehow came up at my comic shop, and the cashier started quizzing me on the show, and I was horrified to realize that I knew every answer instantly. “What’s ALF stand for?” “Alien Life Form.” “What’s ALF’s real name?” “Gordon Shumway.” “What’s ALF’s favorite food.” “Cats, c’mon, give me something hard!” Notably, he could have stumped me by asking me anything about any of the show’s human characters, or even to recount the plot of a single episode, but why would he? They were never the point; ALF was the point. I can’t blame Max Wright for being pissed about being outstaged by a puppet.

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THE MUPPET SHOW

I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, but The Muppet Show is the best possible iteration of the Muppets. Obviously you have all the iconic Muppet characters at their best, but that’s combined with great reoccurring segments and guests who, unlike Max Wright, are almost always fully committed to having fun and being second-fiddle to a bunch of puppets. The sketch format is what gives this the greatest advantage; the Muppet movies, many of which I love dearly mind you, sometimes struggle under the weight of a feature-length story or the need to string its various sketches together into a coherent plot. Sketch shows were nothing new when the Muppets came to town, but at times their rapid-fire zaniness feels close to something that might have aired on early Adult Swim, and it keeps the show feeling light, propulsive, and fresh. This is one I would happily revisit as an adult, and wish some random network was airing right now.

For whatever reason, the one sketch that pops immediately to mind is a “Pigs in Space” segment where the pigs’ ship has been transported into a realm that will reveal to them the meaning of life…except it takes so long, that one by one the pigs get bored and wander out of the cockpit to go get a snack. That feels about right.

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FRAGGLE ROCK

I remember there always being a slight air of fear and mystery around this show for me. It aired on HBO, a channel we only got for a week at at time, twice a year, during their free previews, so I never caught it consistently enough to fully comprehend the premise and characters. I just knew the big Muppets wanted to eat the little Muppets and at times came frighteningly close to doing so. It legitimately scared me, giving young Spencer the same kind of anxiety the first couple of seasons of The Good Place gave modern Spencer (except young Spencer had much less guarantee that everything would turn out okay). I don’t have the fond memories of this show that so many do.

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PERFECT STRANGER/BOSOM BUDDIES

I watched Perfect Strangers all the time when I was very young. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single episode of Bosom Buddies in my life. Did that stop me from thinking they were the same show for literal decades? Sadly, no. No, it did not.

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3rd ROCK FROM THE SUN

Hey, remember when Joseph Gordon Levitt was a big enough star that “this was the show that launched JGL’s career” was a really interesting piece of trivia? I think sex was talked about enough on this show that, as a sheltered evangelical kid, I was scandalized just by the commercials for this one. As the child of 90s country music fanatics, though, I mostly just wondered how/if it was connected to Joe Diffie’s Third Rock from the Sun, which was popular around the same time.

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THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW

Here’s a mind-blower: what we think of today as The Carol Burnett Show is not The Carol Burnett Show. The original series was an hour long and lasted for 11 seasons. The version of the show that plays in reruns is called Carol Burnett and Friends, and consists of material from Seasons 6-10 repackaged into half-hour chunks. That’s why some episodes would begin with Carol talking to the audience while others would skip over it entirely; Friends also skipped the original show’s musical guests. I once read a piece by a critic of the show claiming that the only reason Carol Burnett is remembered so fondly is because only its best sketches have lived on in rerun form, while far larger amounts of mediocre material were left on the cutting room floor.

My family and I loved watching Carol Burnett together when I was growing up, though my main memory of it is Tim Conway acting like a doofus. My mom’s been watching a lot of the show lately on MeTV and what strikes me now is how it’s very much a product of its time. So many of the sketches are riffs on popular movies and commercials and tropes of the sixties and seventies, most of which are lost even on someone my age. My mom remembers them all, though.

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MAMA’S FAMILY

There’s two distinct eras of this show. It originally aired for two seasons on a broadcast network, to mediocre ratings; it was later retooled and created four more seasons that went into immediate syndication. During the retool, the show dropped both of Venton’s children, never to be seen or even mentioned again, killed off Rue McClanahan’s Aunt Fran, and greatly reduced Betty White’s role as Ellen, replacing them with Mama’s grandson Bubba and neighbor Iola. Just catching scattered episodes of this show growing up made this wildly confusing, as TBS would often air them in random order. The theme song shows each cast member in a picture frame, and I came to think that not every family member appeared in every episode and that the theme song only showed which character was in that specific episode, and that it changed from week to week. That was the only thing that made any sense to my young, confused mind.

I caught quite a bit of Mama’s Family during family dinners in 2019, and it’s perfectly fine. The characters are broad, but specific and all different from each other, the plots generic, but Mama gets great zingers and punchlines. There’s a few too many fat jokes, like most sitcoms of its time, but it’s passable. The behind the scenes drama is far more interesting than anything onscreen (there were apparently some hurt feeling on Carol Burnett’s behalf during the syndicated years as well).

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JOEY

Did you know that Joey — the Friends spin-off which is not only best known, but only known, for being a total and complete failure — ran for two whole seasons and aired almost fifty episodes?! That’s five times as many episodes as Tuca and Bertie got. Humanity weeps.

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MY MOTHER THE CAR

Back when TV Land first launched as a television network, for their first 24 hours they played the pilot episodes of every “classic” TV show they had available, and my father taped a good number of them. It was on that tape that I discovered a strange little show called My Mother the Car. It’s about a man whose deceased mother is reincarnated as, you guessed it, his car, and begins speaking to him as if she’d never left. I chuckled at it as a kid, but years later discovered that it’s widely considered one of the worst, if not the worst, sitcoms of all time. Who knew? Like many shows on this list, its best feature was its theme song, which I can still hear in my head despite not watching the one episode of it I’ve ever even seen in decades.

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GREEN ACRES

Green Acres is probably best known for its explanatory theme song, which tells the tale of big city lawyer Oliver Douglas deciding to become a farmer and dragging his pampered wife Lisa kicking and screaming into country life. What always hit me funny about this is that, while the theme song accurately describes the show’s origin, it doesn’t really describe its premise. By the time they get halfway through the first season it becomes clear that the batty Lisa fits in perfectly with farm life in the equally absurd and offbeat town of Hooterville, while Oliver hates it, largely sticking with the farm out of stubborn principal even as it seems the entire world is out to personally humiliate him and ruin his work. It’s a complete 180 from the original premise, and I’ve often wondered if people were ever confused by the contrast.

I don’t know if a lot of people realize how surreal Green Acres could be, especially as it went along. After a while it became a running gag that everybody (except Oliver) could see the credits (such as “written by” and “directed by”) that appeared over the actors at the beginning of each episode, and regularly commented on and interacted with them. I don’t go out of my way to watch Green Acres, but if it’s on when I’m in the room I’ll usually stick around for a while, and that’s more than I can say for a lot of the shows on this list.

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THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES

I watched too much Beverly Hillibillies as a tween, which is unfortunate because now I have opinions. There’s an interesting shift in tone between the black and white episodes and the color episodes. As many series do early in their run, the black and white episodes had many reoccurring characters who eventually faded away (Jethro’s family, Mrs. Dreysdale), but the episodes themselves were much more episodic. The color episodes settled into longer arcs, and it wasn’t to the show’s advantage, because for Beverly Hillbillies arcs meant stories that drug out longer than shonen animes, and repeating the same jokes over and over in each new episode featuring the same characters. I reached a point where I had to change the channel any time they aired a “Naval Frog-Man” episode because I was ready to throw the remote at the TV. Give me the black and white episodes or give me death.

It should also be noted that this is another case of an expository theme song that’s not actually correct. The song claims that Jed struck oil when he was out hunting, but in the first episode of the show Jed states that he always knew the oil was there, he just didn’t know it was worth anything. He was willing to pay someone to come get it off his property! Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

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PETTICOAT JUNCTION

Petticoat Junction somehow acted as the linchpin in the bizarre shared universe CBS had running for a while in the 1960s between Petticoat, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Green Acres, with characters moving freely between the three shows, usually because they knew a character on Petticoat. Somehow, despite my loving both the other shows, I always found Petticoat Junction to be agonizingly boring, a more wholesome throwback with none of its universe-mates’ zaniness or surrealism. Just dull, dull, dull, dull, dull. I can understand the appeal of a gentle domestic comedy, but that’s not much my speed now, and it certainly wasn’t as a kid.

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BABY BLUES

Did you know there was an adult-oriented animated series based off the syndicated comic strip Baby Blues? The only reason I do is because I watched the pilot episode the night it premiered on The WB. I was pumped. I haven’t talked on here yet about how much I love newspaper comics, but I love newspaper comics. At the time I owned at least four or five collected editions of the Baby Blues comic and followed it daily in the paper, and if I’m being honest, it’s still one of the better ongoing strips out there. Outside of the MacPherson family, though, the show was barely related to the strip, re-imagining it as an adult comedy in the vein of Family Guy and creating a new supporting cast from scratch. As a kid watching it I was scandalized by the risque stuff; as a Baby Blues fan, I was alienated by the decision to abandon everything that I enjoyed about the strip. I’m obviously no longer “scandalized,” but despite Adult Swim occasionally rerunning the series, I’ve never been even slightly interested in giving it a second chance.

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THE WONDER YEARS

I would like to revisit The Wonder Years as an adult sometime, because, despite being on the cusp of my teen years when this one hit Nick at Nite, I was in no way ready for it yet. Here’s an embarrassing story involving me and this show, though: One time I was watching it after a church function with the daughter of one of my parents’ friends, who was maybe around nine, and there was a whole episode where Paul admits to Kevin at the end that he’s a virgin and he’s embarrassed (I rolled my eyes, knowing Kevin was a virgin too and annoyed at him for acting like he wasn’t, which in retrospect was probably the point), and the daughter turns to me and goes “what’s a virgin?” And I freeze. And she asks me a few times and I don’t answer so she wanders to the next room and asks her parents and I’m making awkward eye contact with my parents from the living room silently mouthing “I’m sorry!” over and over. Her dad just said “Winnie Cooper’s one” and she immediately calmed down, but I was probably the color of a lobster for a week after that.

Anyway, please talk to your kids about sex and support comprehensive sexual education programs in your local schools.

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THE FACTS OF LIFE

I spent so many hours of my life watching this show, but it’s another one where specifics escape me. I remember all the characters and their personalities, and the various phases of their lives and the many places they lived together (remember when Molly Ringwald was a series regular living in their dorm in season one?), but if I had to describe the plot of an episode to you, I wouldn’t have much to work with. I wonder why sitcoms especially tend to work like that? Is it because you’re meant to build relationships with these characters over time, and a new episode is just an excuse to spend time with characters you like, who tend to change little, or just very slowly, over the course of the series? I guess sitcoms are comfort food for a reason.

One thing I do remember very specifically about The Facts of Life is that Nick at Nite always seemed to skip past the “Edna’s Edibles” era of the show, or I at least somehow missed almost all of those episodes every single time they came around in the rotation. For me, they were always living at the school, then BLAM Edna’s Edibles has burnt to the ground and they’re rebuilding the store into “Over Our Heads.” The episode with the fire is the one specific plot I can remember, as it seemed to air all the time. That episode was also my first exposure to Mackenzie Astin’s character, Andy, who to me seemed to appear out nowhere and apparently never had his origins referenced again after his introduction because I never did figure out who exactly he was, just that he was there now, deal with it.

Man, watching television was such a different experience before the internet.

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ABOUT

“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!